A density and reliability guided aggregation for the assessment of vessels and nerve fibres tortuosity

Pan Su, Tianhua Chen, Jianyang Xie, Baikai Ma, Hong Qi, Jiang Liu, Yitian Zhao

Research output: Journal PublicationArticlepeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The tortuosity assessment of vessels and nerve fibres in ophthalmic images has drawn substantial attention, for its potentials in assisting various medical diagnoses. Numerous morphological tortuosity measures have been leveraged to quantify tortuosity from various perspectives, which warrants the simultaneous use of multiple measures with an aim to produce a robust and accurate assessment. This paper proposes an approach for the automated assessment of curvilinear structures' tortuosity. Starting with the generation of clusters of tortuosity density for each individual measure, labelled fuzzy sets are then extracted that enhances the readability of subsequent operations. Finally, results from multiple measures are aggregated by a nearest neighbour guided approach where weights are generated in a data-driven manner to explain the derived aggregations. Experimental results on both ophthalmic vessel and nerve images demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method over those where measurements are used independently or aggregated using conventional averaging operators.

Original languageEnglish
Article number9123336
Pages (from-to)139199-139211
Number of pages13
JournalIEEE Access
Volume8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Tortuosity
  • aggregation functions
  • linguistic terms
  • ophthalmic images

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Computer Science
  • General Materials Science
  • General Engineering

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'A density and reliability guided aggregation for the assessment of vessels and nerve fibres tortuosity'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this