Semi-Automated Computer Analysis of Retinal Vessels in Premature Infants

Abstract

Almost all ocular and systemic diseases affect blood vessel attributes (tortuosity, length, width, and curvature). Quantitative measurements of these attributes could thus provide useful tool for diagnosing the severity of several diseases. However, it is still unclear how best to represent the attribute values of multiple vessels in a single image. Graphical user interface (GUI) is a promising step towards the development of a semi-automated computer assisted tool. The objective of this study is to develop a GUI for effective observation and robust retinal blood vessels analysis by ophthalmologists and to comprehend the distribution of vessels attributes. Blood vessels from 45 digital fundus images of infant retina are extracted, its centerline is delineated and tortuosity is analyzed from different putative and proposed techniques to provide reliable and comprehensive information for the retinal vasculature. K means clustering technique is used for classification analysis of different tortuosity metrics and its performance is evaluated based on sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. The results are validated by comparing with expert ophthalmologists’ ground truths. Among the various proposed tortuosity metrics, one of our tortuosity indexes attains the highest classification accuracy of 91.42% with sensitivity and specificity of 86.36% and 97.82% respectively.