Automated detection and measurement of isolated retinal arterioles by a combination of edge enhancement and cost analysis.

José A Fernández
Peter Bankhead
Huiyu Zhou
J Graham McGeown
Tim M Curtis

Open link

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0091791

Publisher

Public Library of Science (PLoS)

Journal

issn:1932-6203

Abstract

Pressure myography studies have played a crucial role in our understanding of vascular physiology and pathophysiology. Such studies depend upon the reliable measurement of changes in the diameter of isolated vessel segments over time. Although several software packages are available to carry out such measurements on small arteries and veins, no such software exists to study smaller vessels (<50 µm in diameter). We provide here a new, freely available open-source algorithm, MyoTracker, to measure and track changes in the diameter of small isolated retinal arterioles. The program has been developed as an ImageJ plug-in and uses a combination of cost analysis and edge enhancement to detect the vessel walls. In tests performed on a dataset of 1...