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Artery/Vein Vessel Tree Identification in Near-Infrared Reflectance Retinographies

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Abstract

An accurate identification of the retinal arteries and veins is a relevant issue in the development of automatic computer-aided diagnosis systems that facilitate the analysis of different relevant diseases that affect the vascular system as diabetes or hypertension, among others. The proposed method offers a complete analysis of the retinal vascular tree structure by its identification and posterior classification into arteries and veins using optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans. These scans include the near-infrared reflectance retinography images, the ones we used in this work, in combination with the corresponding histological sections. The method, firstly, segments the vessel tree and identifies its characteristic points. Then, Global Intensity-Based Features (GIBS) are used to measure the differences in the intensity profiles between arteries and veins. A k-means clustering classifier employs these features to evaluate the potential of artery/vein identification of the proposed method. Finally, a post-processing stage is applied to correct misclassifications using context information and maximize the performance of the classification process. The methodology was validated using an OCT image dataset retrieved from 46 different patients, where 2,392 vessel segments and 97,294 vessel points were manually labeled by an expert clinician. The method achieved satisfactory results, reaching a best accuracy of 93.35% in the identification of arteries and veins, being the first proposal that faces this issue in this image modality.

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Funding

This work is supported by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Government of Spain and FEDER funds of the European Union through the DTS18/00136 research project and by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Government of Spain through the DPI2015-69948-R research project. Also, this work has received financial support from the European Union (European Regional Development Fund—ERDF); the Xunta de Galicia, Centro singular de investigación de Galicia accreditation 2016–2019, Ref. ED431G/01; and Grupos de Referencia Competitiva, Ref. ED431C 2016-047.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of A Coruña, 15071, A Coruña, Spain

    Joaquim de Moura, Jorge Novo, José Rouco & Marcos Ortega

  2. CITIC - Research Center of Information and Communication Technologies, University of A Coruña, 15071, A Coruña, Spain

    Joaquim de Moura, Jorge Novo, José Rouco & Marcos Ortega

  3. Instituto Oftalmológico Victoria de Rojas, 15009, A Coruña, Spain

    Pablo Charlón

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  1. Joaquim de Moura
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Correspondence to Joaquim de Moura.

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de Moura, J., Novo, J., Rouco, J. et al. Artery/Vein Vessel Tree Identification in Near-Infrared Reflectance Retinographies. J Digit Imaging 32, 947–962 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-019-00235-x

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