Automated measurement of retinal vascular tortuosity

Automatic measurement of blood vessel tortuosity is a useful capability for automatic ophthalmological diagnostic tools. We describe a suite of automated tortuosity measures for blood vessel segments extracted from RGB retinal images. The tortuosity measures were evaluated in two classification tasks: (1) classifying the tortuosity of blood vessel segments and (2) classifying the tortuosity of blood vessel networks. These tortuosity measures were able to achieve a classification rate of 91% for the first problem and 95% on the second problem, which confirms that they capture much of the ophthalmologists' notion of tortuosity.