Abstract
Retinal images provide early signs of diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and hypertension. These signs can be investigated based on microaneurysms or smaller vessels. The diagnostic biomarkers are the change of vessel widths and angles especially at junctions, which are investigated using the vessel segmentation or tracking. Vessel paths may also be interrupted; crossings and bifurcations may be disconnected. This paper addresses a novel contextual method based on the geometry of the primary visual cortex (V1) to study these difficulties. We have analyzed the specific problems at junctions with a connectivity kernel obtained as the fundamental solution of the Fokker-Planck equation, which is usually used to represent the geometrical structure of multi-orientation cortical connectivity. Using the spectral clustering on a large local affinity matrix constructed by both the connectivity kernel and the feature of intensity, the vessels are identified successfully in a hierarchical topology each representing an individual perceptual unit.
Highlights
1.1 Clinical Importance of Retinal Blood VesselsEpidemic growth of systemic, cardiovascular, and ophthalmologic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, glaucoma, and arteriosclerosis [38,48,67], their high impact on the quality of life, and the substantial need for increase in health care resources [43,68] indicate the importance of conducting large screening programs for early diagnosis and treatment of such diseases
The proposed method models the connectivity as the fundamental solution of the Fokker–Planck equation, which matches the statistical distribution of edge co-occurrence in natural images and is a good model of the cortical connectivity [60]
The green channel provides a higher contrast between vessels and background and it is widely used in retinal image analysis
Summary
Cardiovascular, and ophthalmologic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, glaucoma, and arteriosclerosis [38,48,67], their high impact on the quality of life, and the substantial need for increase in health care resources [43,68] indicate the importance of conducting large screening programs for early diagnosis and treatment of such diseases. This is impossible without using automated computer-aided systems because of the large population involved. The other clinically highly promising but still underrated information is based on studying the smaller vessels, because it is expected that the signs of diseases such as diabetic retinopathy appears in smaller vessels earlier than in larger ones
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