MAPPING THE HUMAN RETINA

A new method for the diagnosis and treatment of exsudative age-related macular degeneration based on the imaging capabilities of a Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscope (SLO) is introduced. A map of essential anatomical features and pathological changes is drawn by information fusion of features obtained from different SLO images. A new technique for image registration, the affine matching of intermediate symbolic information, is presented, so that features extracted from different sources can be fused into one representation. Based on the obtained spatial relationship between anatomical and pathological features, the classification of the patients into three groups, each receiving different treatment, can be performed. This classification concept was successfully applied to a group of more than 50 patients.