Segmentation of Retinal Arterial Bifurcations in 2D Adaptive Optics Ophthalmoscopy Images

The study of vascular morphometry requires segmenting vessels with high precision. Of particular clinical interest is the morpho-metric analysis of arterial bifurcations in Adaptive Optics Ophthalmoscopy (AOO) images of eye fundus. In this paper, we extend our previous approach for segmenting retinal vessel branches to the segmentation of bifurcations. This enables us to recover the microvascular tree and extract biomarkers that charactarize the blood flow. Segmentation results are shown to be within the range of intra-and inter-user variability, allowing a preliminary study on biomarkers derived from vessel diameter estimates at arterial bifurcations.