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Purpose: To study the frequency and severity of artifacts in optical Coherence tomography images and to develop a new algorithm for improved retinal thickness detection.Methods: We propose a new method to measure the retinal thickness in OCT scans. We compared our modified edge detection (MED) method to the Markov method and the conventional OCT algorithm (cOCT) in 226 OCT macular scans.Results: We defined errors as a difference in detected interface location of less than 100 µm offset for less than 10 A-scans, otherwise it was an artifact. The frequency of errors was reduced from 32% (cOCT) to less than 2% with the MED method, while the Markov method had a frequency of 5%. Artifacts were reduced from 9.3% (cOCT) to 0.9% (MED) while the Markov method had a frequency of 11.5%.Conclusion: The results show the MED method of detecting retinal thickness is superior to the other two methods, since the OCT method is prone to both errors and artifacts and the Markov method is robust only to healthy retina. Our MED method is robust for detection of normal retinas and effective even in eyes with pathological conditions. Use of improved retinal thickness detection algorithm should significantly improve clinical utility of the optical coherence tomograph.

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