Retinal Vasculature Identification and Characterization Using OCT Imaging

Abstract

The eye fundus is the part of the human body where the blood vessels can be directly observed and studied. For this reason, the analysis and diagnosis of many relevant diseases that affect the circulatory system, for example, reference, hypertension, diabetes or arteriosclerosis can be supported by the use of this source of information, analyzing their degree of severity and impact by the study of the properties of the retinal microcirculation. The development of computer aided-diagnosis tools became relevant over the recent years as they support and facilitate the work of specialists, helping to accurately identify the target structures in many processes of analysis and diagnosis. In that sense, the automatic identification of the retinal vasculature is crucial as its manual identification is an exhaustive and tedious work when it is manually performed by the experts. This chapter presents an analysis of the characteristics of the optical coherence tomography imaging and its potential for the retinal vascular identification and characterization. In that sense, we also analyze computational approaches to automatically obtain and characterize the retinal vasculature and provide an intuitive visualization that facilitates the posterior clinical analysis of relevant diseases such as hypertension or diabetes.