Vascular biomarkers for diabetes and diabetic retinopathy screening

The chapter describes automated quantitative vascular biomarkers in retinal fundus images for the early warning of retinal damage, as developed in the Sino-Dutch RetinaCheck project. The software implements brain-inspired algorithms, exploiting multiscale, and multiorientation geometric methods. A full pipeline is presented, including background normalization, crossing-preserving vessel enhancement, nonlinear denoising, and contextual vessel completion. The quantitative biomarkers are vessel width, vessel tortuosity, vessel bifurcation measures, and several fractal dimensions. The methods are extensively validated and show high robustness and state-of-the-art performance.