A Curvature Based Approach for the Identification of Tortuous Blood Vessels in Retinal images of Preterm Infants

Retinal blood vessel tortuosity is an important signature for the diagnosis of many systemic and non-systemic diseases. It can be mild with no visual impairments or may become severe, leading to permanent blindness. Retinal fundus images captured using Retcam Ophthalmic Imaging Device are screened for checking the presence of tortuous blood vessels in preterm infants. The tortuosity seen in the retina of preterm infants contributes to the detection of Plus disease, a major indicator of Retinopathy of Prematurity. The conventional disease diagnosis procedure involves a trained expert manually inspect the amount of tortuosity present in the blood vessels by comparing it with a gold standard image. Manual inspections are often subjective and may lead to errors due to the lack of experience or mindset of the examining clinician. Hence, there exists a need for automatic screening of retinal blood vessels for evaluating their tortuous behaviour. This paper put forward a curvature-based technique to identify tortuous vessels in an infant retinal image. The proposed technique can be further extended for the diagnosis of Plus disease in preterm infants.