Towards automatic detection of abnormal retinal capillaries in ultra-widefield-of-view retinal angiographic exams

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2013:2013:7372-5. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2013.6611261.

Abstract

Retinal capillary abnormalities include small, leaky, severely tortuous blood vessels that are associated with a variety of retinal pathologies. We present a prototype image-processing system for detecting abnormal retinal capillary regions in ultra-widefield-of-view (UWFOV) fluorescein angiography exams of the human retina. The algorithm takes as input an UWFOV FA frame and returns the candidate regions identified. An SVM classifier is trained on regions traced by expert ophthalmologists. Tests with a variety of feature sets indicate that edge features and allied properties differentiate best between normal and abnormal retinal capillary regions. Experiments with an initial set of images from patients showing branch retinal vein occlusion (BRVO) indicate promising area under the ROC curve of 0.950 and a weighted Cohen's Kappa value of 0.822.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Electronic Data Processing*
  • Fluorescein Angiography / instrumentation
  • Fluorescein Angiography / methods*
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / instrumentation
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Ophthalmology / instrumentation
  • Ophthalmology / methods
  • ROC Curve
  • Retina / pathology
  • Retinal Vein Occlusion / pathology
  • Retinal Vessels / pathology*
  • Support Vector Machine