A Multi-Orientation Analysis Approach to Retinal Vessel Tracking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a biologically inspired multi-orientation analysis method for automatic retinal vessel tracking, effectively handling complex vessel structures and providing detailed vasculature models for clinical analysis.

Contribution

The novel approach uses invertible orientation scores and a geometric curve optimization principle in SE(2) for robust vessel tracking, addressing challenges like crossings and bifurcations.

Findings

Successfully tracks complex vessel structures including crossings and bifurcations

Provides fully automatic detailed retinal vasculature models

Enhances quantitative retinal analysis for screening applications

Abstract

This paper presents a method for retinal vasculature extraction based on biologically inspired multi-orientation analysis. We apply multi-orientation analysis via so-called invertible orientation scores, modeling the cortical columns in the visual system of higher mammals. This allows us to generically deal with many hitherto complex problems inherent to vessel tracking, such as crossings, bifurcations, parallel vessels, vessels of varying widths and vessels with high curvature. Our approach applies tracking in invertible orientation scores via a novel geometrical principle for curve optimization in the Euclidean motion group SE(2). The method runs fully automatically and provides a detailed model of the retinal vasculature, which is crucial as a sound basis for further quantitative analysis of the retina, especially in screening applications.