Conference proceeding
Automated measurement of retinal blood vessel tortuosity
Proceedings of SPIE, Vol.7624(1), pp.76243A-76243A-9
Medical Imaging 2010: Computer-Aided Diagnosis
03/09/2010
DOI: 10.1117/12.844641
Abstract
Abnormalities in the vascular pattern of the retina are
associated with retinal diseases and are also risk
factors for systemic diseases, especially
cardiovascular diseases. The three-dimensional
retinal vascular pattern is mostly formed
congenitally, but is then modified over life, in
response to aging, vessel wall dystrophies and long
term changes in blood flow and pressure. A
characteristic of the vascular pattern that is
appreciated by clinicians is vascular tortuosity, i.e.
how curved or kinked a blood vessel, either vein or
artery, appears along its course. We developed a new
quantitative metric for vascular tortuosity, based on
the vessel's angle of curvature, length of the curved
vessel over its chord length (arc to chord ratio),
number of curvature sign changes, and combined
these into a unidimensional metric, Tortuosity Index
(TI). In comparison to other published methods this
method can estimate appropriate TI for vessels with
constant curvature sign and vessels with equal arc to
chord ratios, as well. We applied this method to a
dataset of 15 digital fundus images of 8 patients with
Facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD),
and to the other publically available dataset of 60
fundus images of normal cases and patients with
hypertensive retinopathy, of which the arterial and
venous tortuosities have also been graded by masked
experts (ophthalmologists). The method produced
exactly the same rank-ordered list of vessel tortuosity
(TI) values as obtained by averaging the tortuosity
grading given by 3 ophthalmologists for FSHD
dataset and a list of TI values with high ranking
correlation with the ophthalmologist's grading for
the other dataset. Our results show that TI has
potential to detect and evaluate abnormal retinal
vascular structure in early diagnosis and prognosis of
retinopathies.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Automated measurement of retinal blood vessel tortuosity
- Creators
- Vinayak Joshi - The Univ. of Iowa (United States)Joseph M Reinhardt - The Univ. of Iowa (United States)Michael D Abramoff - The Univ. of Iowa (United States)
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Publication Details
- Proceedings of SPIE, Vol.7624(1), pp.76243A-76243A-9
- Conference
- Medical Imaging 2010: Computer-Aided Diagnosis
- DOI
- 10.1117/12.844641
- ISSN
- 0277-786X
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 03/09/2010
- Academic Unit
- Radiology; Fraternal Order of Eagles Diabetes Research Center; Electrical and Computer Engineering; Roy J. Carver Department of Biomedical Engineering; Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences
- Record Identifier
- 9984060959102771
Metrics
9 Record Views