Computation of tortuosity of two dimensional vessels

Vessel tortuosity is an important parameter in determining the presence or the severity of various diseases that are diagnosed based on the pathology of vessels. An accurate quantification of vessel tortuosity would therefore be of great clinical significance. Usually, the branches of blood vessels are also captured, along with the major blood vessel, in the medical images, thereby posing a challenge to the computation of tortuosity. This necessitates some pre-processing of the images, to remove the branches of blood vessels, accomplished using contour tracing techniques, as proposed in this paper. In this paper, we propose a novel metric to compute tortuosity for two dimensional vessels, with brief indications of its implementation using image processing techniques, and provide evidence of its advantages over other methods.