Lee Noah author Columbia University. Biomedical Engineering Columbia University. Ophthalmology Laine Andrew F. author Columbia University. Biomedical Engineering Columbia University. Radiology Smith R. Theodore author Columbia University. Ophthalmology Columbia University. Biomedical Engineering originator text Articles 2007 English Fundus auto-fluorescence (FAF) images with hypo-fluorescence indicate geographic atrophy (GA) of the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) in age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Manual quantification of GA is time consuming and prone to inter- and intra-observer variability. Automatic quantification is important for determining disease progression and facilitating clinical diagnosis of AMD. In this paper we describe a hybrid segmentation method for GA quantification by identifying hypo-fluorescent GA regions from other interfering retinal vessel structures. First, we employ background illumination correction exploiting a non-linear adaptive smoothing operator. Then, we use the level set framework to perform segmentation of hypo-fluorescent areas. Finally, we present an energy function combining morphological scale-space analysis with a geometric model-based approach to perform segmentation refinement of false positive hypo- fluorescent areas due to interfering retinal structures. The clinically apparent areas of hypo-fluorescence were drawn by an expert grader and compared on a pixel by pixel basis to our segmentation results. The mean sensitivity and specificity of the ROC analysis were 0.89 and 0.98%. 2007 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society: Lyon, France, 22-26 August 2007 (Piscataway, N.J.: IEEE, 2007), pp. 4965-4968. Biomedical engineering