Automated retinal vessel recognition and measurements on large datasets

The characteristics of the retinal vascular network have been prospectively associated with many systemic and vascular diseases. QUARTZ is a fully automated software that has been developed to localize and quantify the morphological characteristics of blood vessels in retinal images for use in epidemiological studies. This software was used to analyse a dataset containing 16,000 retinal images from the EPIC-Norfolk cohort study. The objective of this paper is to both assess the suitability of this dataset for computational analysis and to further evaluate the QUARTZ software.