Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine (Mar 2022)

A Deep Learning System for Fully Automated Retinal Vessel Measurement in High Throughput Image Analysis

  • Danli Shi,
  • Zhihong Lin,
  • Wei Wang,
  • Zachary Tan,
  • Xianwen Shang,
  • Xueli Zhang,
  • Wei Meng,
  • Zongyuan Ge,
  • Mingguang He,
  • Mingguang He,
  • Mingguang He

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcvm.2022.823436
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9

Abstract

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MotivationRetinal microvasculature is a unique window for predicting and monitoring major cardiovascular diseases, but high throughput tools based on deep learning for in-detail retinal vessel analysis are lacking. As such, we aim to develop and validate an artificial intelligence system (Retina-based Microvascular Health Assessment System, RMHAS) for fully automated vessel segmentation and quantification of the retinal microvasculature.ResultsRMHAS achieved good segmentation accuracy across datasets with diverse eye conditions and image resolutions, having AUCs of 0.91, 0.88, 0.95, 0.93, 0.97, 0.95, 0.94 for artery segmentation and 0.92, 0.90, 0.96, 0.95, 0.97, 0.95, 0.96 for vein segmentation on the AV-WIDE, AVRDB, HRF, IOSTAR, LES-AV, RITE, and our internal datasets. Agreement and repeatability analysis supported the robustness of the algorithm. For vessel analysis in quantity, less than 2 s were needed to complete all required analysis.

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