title: Summarising the retinal vascular calibres in healthy, diabetic and diabetic retinopathy eyes.
abstract: Retinal vessel calibre has been found to be an important biomarker of several retinal diseases, including diabetic retinopathy (DR). Quantifying the retinal vessel calibres is an important step for estimating the central retinal artery and vein equivalents. In this study, an alternative method to the already established branching coefficient (BC) is proposed for summarising the vessel calibres in retinal junctions. This new method combines the mean diameter ratio with an alternative to Murray׳s cube law exponent, derived by the fractal dimension,experimentally, and the branch exponent of cerebral vessels, as has been suggested in previous studies with blood flow modelling. For the above calculations, retinal images from healthy, diabetic and DR subjects were used. In addition, the above method was compared with the BC and was also applied to the evaluation of arteriovenous ratio as a biomarker of progression from diabetes to DR in four consecutive years, i.e. three/two/one years before the onset of DR and the first year of DR. Moreover, the retinal arteries and veins around the optic nerve head were also evaluated. The new approach quantifies the vessels more accurately. The decrease in terms of the mean absolute percentage error was between 0.24% and 0.49%, extending at the same time the quantification beyond healthy subjects.
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, University of Lincoln, Brayford Pool Campus, LN67TS Lincoln, United Kingdom. Electronic address: gleontidis@lincoln.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Georgios
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Leontidis
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, University of Lincoln, Brayford Pool Campus, LN67TS Lincoln, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Bashir
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Al-Diri
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, University of Lincoln, Brayford Pool Campus, LN67TS Lincoln, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hunter
mesh_terms: D016022:Case-Control Studies; D003920:Diabetes Mellitus / Q000473:pathology*; D003930:Diabetic Retinopathy / Q000473:pathology*; D006801:Humans; D012171:Retinal Vessels / Q000473:pathology*
keywords: Arteriovenous ratio; Diabetic retinopathy; Gamma ratio; Junction exponent; Vessel calibres