Extracting medically relevant features from the human retina

Background: The Retina is “the area at the back of the eye that receives light and sends pictures of what the eye sees to the brain” (Cambridge Dictionary). It is the only part of our cardio vascular system that can be observed non-intrusively (without having the perform an operation): from looking at it, doctors can learn about our state of health regarding a range of diseases.

We would like to be able to use computers to automatically extract numerical values (features) from Retinal Images that could be of potential use for doctors.

Goal: The goal of this project is to implement a MATLAB program to manipulate retinal images with the objective of extracting numerical values that could be used to assess the state of health of an individual. A simple example of an interesting features could be the number of blood vessels in the retina. We will work on (anonymized) data from real patients from a Swiss Cohort related to hypertension (SKIPHOG).

Computational Tools: Students will be asked to write a MATLAB program to manipulate 2D retinal images. The task will be simplified by the use of a MATLAB library called “Image processing Toolbox”.

Mathematical tools: Students will be asked to use simple statistics (comparison of probability distributions) to assess whether the features they have extracted carry information.

Biological or Medical aspects: the state of our retinal provides information about diseases such as hypertension, atherosclerosis, macular degeneration, retinopathy, glaucoma of the eye.

Supervisor: Mattia Tomasoni

Kick-off meeting presentation File:Extracting medically relevant features of the human retina 2018.pdf