[Estimation of the retinal microvascular calibre in hypertensive patients with the snakes semiautomatic model]
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Published on: March 12, 2022
Antonio Pose-Reino1, Marta Pena Seijo, Manuel González Penedo
1Unidad de Pluripatología, Servicio de Medicina Interna, Departamento de Medicina, Hospital de Conxo, Complexo Hospitalario Universitario de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. antoniopose@telefonica.net
Background And Objective:
Early alterations in retinal microcirculation are observed in most hypertensive patients seen in daily practice and the European guidelines consider it is necessary an objective method to quantify these alterations. We have previously described a semi-automatic computerized system to evaluate the calibre of retinal blood vessels that has shown high sensitivity and specificity to calculate the arteriovenous ratio (AVR), though with limitations. We describe a method based on the snakes model to calculate the arteriovenous ratio.
Patients And Method:
We had compared it with the previously reported lineal method, and we have analyzed 173 digital photographs from 96 hypertensive patients, most of them receiving treatment. Photos were made in two hospitals (A Coruña: 66 and Santiago de Compostela: 107), and were analysed by the same people in each Centre, by the lineal and snake method.
Results:
We have observed that the arithmetic mean and the differences in AVR between both methods were minimal and showed a normal distribution. Cronbach statistics was 0.974 and intraclass correlation coefficient 0.949 (p<0.001), for the images from Santiago and 0.923 with an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.857 (p<0.001) for the images from A Coruña.
Conclusion:
This semiautomatic method to calculate the AVR ratio has a high sensitivity and a greater specificity than previous method, and the correlation between the results obtained with both is excellent.
