A fully automated system for retinal vessel tortuosity diagnosis using scale dependent vessel tracing and grading

A fully automated system for retinal vessel tortuosity system diagnosis is proposed in this paper. Our diagnosis system includes: (1) automated retinal vessel segmentation and tracing; (2) computerized tortuosity grading. In recent years, many works have been done on computerized diagnosis of retinal vessel tortuosity. But there are few researchers working on a fully automated system. The major difficulties in producing a fully automated system includes: (1) automated tracing of vessels to identify each individual branch; (2) global tortuosity grading of a retinal vessel image. In this paper, we propose a scheme to trace and grade retinal vessels using scale (variant widths and lengths of vessel segments) dependent techniques. The experimental results show that our system is useful in clinical applications.