A fully automated pipeline of extracting biomarkers to quantify vascular changes in retina-related diseases

Abstract

This paper presents an automated system for extracting retinal vascular biomarkers for early detection of diabetes. The proposed retinal vessel enhancement, segmentation, optic disc (OD) and fovea detection algorithms provide fundamental tools for extracting the vascular network within the predefined region of interest. Based on that, the artery/vein classification, vessel width, tortuosity and fractal dimension measurement tools are used to assess a large number of quantitative vascular biomarkers. We evaluate our pipeline module by module against human annotations. The results indicate that our automated system is robust to the localisation of OD and fovea, segmentation of vessels and classification of arteries/veins. The proposed pipeline helps to increase the effectiveness of the biomarkers extraction and analysis for the early diabetes, and therefore, has the large potential of being further incorporated into a computer-aided diagnosis system.

Improved fully convolutional neuron networks on small retinal vessel segmentation using local phase as attention

“…In recent years, many research works have revealed that retinal fundus images can provide much helpful information, which is related to multiple diseases, such as Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), Glaucoma, Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) arteriosclerosis, and hypertension (1). Therefore, retinal image analysis is increasingly essential for computer-aided diagnosis (2).…”

Automatic corneal nerve fiber segmentation and geometric biomarker quantification

“…The sensory nervous system in the limbs and the organs is difficult to observe and examine, while the corneal nerve fibers can be observed by CCM, which provides the potential for building a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system. Recently, different CAD systems [15][16][17][18][19][20][21] have been well developed in radiology. To better analyze nerve fibers, we also need to set up a regular work flow: nerve fiber segmentation, biomarker extraction and performing pathological study by investigating the association between the changes of biomarkers and the progression of the disease.…”