A new method for quantification of retinal blood vessel characteristics

Arnav Chavan; Gowreesh Mago; J. Jothi Balaji; Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan

doi:10.1117/12.2576984

5 March 2021 A new method for quantification of retinal blood vessel characteristics

Arnav Chavan, Gowreesh Mago, J. Jothi Balaji, Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan

Proceedings Volume 11623, Ophthalmic Technologies XXXI; 1162320 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2576984
Event: SPIE BiOS, 2021, Online Only

Conference Poster

Abstract

Uniform and quantitative grading of retinal vessel characteristics are replacing subjective and qualitative schemes. However clinically accurate blood vessel extraction is very important. The tortuosity of these vessels is an important metric to study the curvature variations in normal and diseased eyes. In this study we provide a new unsupervised and fully automated approach for studying curvature variation of the blood vessels. We then pro- vide tortuosity quantification of these extracted vessels. In this study we used optical coherence tomography angiographic fundus images of dimensions 420x420 pixels corresponding to 6mm x 6mm were used in this study. We focused on the central circular 210x210 pixel region around the foveal avascular zone (FAZ) for tortuosity quantification. Our segmentation approach starts with a 3mm x 3mm central circular region extraction surrounding the FAZ. We then use a multi-scale, multi-span line detection filter to smoothen out the high noise in the background and at the same time increase the intensity of target vessels. This is followed by a K-means procedure to filter out the noise and target vessels into two categories. Next steps are morphological closing and noise removal and iterative erosion of pixels to skeletonize the vessels. The final extracted vessels are of the form of single pixel piecewise continuous fragments. These are finer than human annotations and at the same time free of noise. We then provide accurate standard tortuosity measures - Distance Measure, Inflection Points, Turning Points, etc. for these OCTA images using the extracted vessels through mathematical modelling.

Citation Download Citation

Arnav Chavan, Gowreesh Mago, J. Jothi Balaji, and Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan "A new method for quantification of retinal blood vessel characteristics", Proc. SPIE 11623, Ophthalmic Technologies XXXI, 1162320 (5 March 2021); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2576984

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