New Acquisition and Analysis for Segmentation of the Intraorbital Optic Nerve in vivo at 3T

Marios C. Yiannakas¹, Ahmed T. Toosy¹, Rhian E. Raftopoulos¹, Raj Kapoor¹, David H. Miller¹, Claudia Angela M. Wheeler-Kingshott¹

A new image acquisition and analysis protocol is presented here for fast and reliable segmentation of the intraorbital optic nerve which employs an improved image acquisition scheme in conjunction with a robust image analysis method commonly used for the segmentation of the cervical cord, a similar model to the intraorbital optic nerve. The images obtainable with the use of the proposed acquisition protocol allow highly reproducible measurements of the mean cross-sectional area of the intraorbital optic nerve.