Automatic Arteriovenous Ratio Computation: Emulating the Experts

Abstract

Abstract. The arteriovenous ratio is an objective way to assess the arteriolar narrowing related to several diseases such as hypertension. It is computed as the ratio between the artery and vein mean widths. However, its calculus is not straightforward since the experts do not use all the retinal vessels. This paper presents an automatic, precise and reproducible methodology for the AVR computation. We analyze the way the experts select the vessels in order to build a system which emulates them. The system was evaluated by two ophthalmologists in a data set of 86 images. The correlation results among the system and the experts are an indication of the reproducibility of the results.