Faculty of Medicine, University of Montenegro, Podgorica, Montenegro.
Faculty of Medicine, University of Montenegro, Podgorica, Montenegro.
Microvasc Res. 2018 Jul;118:36-43. doi: 10.1016/j.mvr.2018.02.006. Epub 2018 Feb 22.
Hypertension and diabetes mellitus represent modifiable risk factors for vascular disease. They cause microvascular remodeling, and ultimately result in end-organ damage. Therefore, development of methods for noninvasive quantification of the effects of hypertension and diabetes mellitus on microvasculature is of paramount importance. The two goals of the study were: 1) to characterize the geometric complexity and inhomogeneity of retinal vasculature in hypertensive retinopathy (HR) and in proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) by using box counting fractal dimension and lacunarity analysis, and 2) to determine if the combination of these two parameters can be used to describe differences in the vascular tree geometry between HR and PDR. The extended set of retinal images from the publicly available STARE database was manually segmented by our expert, validated, and made available for other researchers to use. The healthy retinal vascular network has a higher complexity (fractal dimension) compared to that in HR and in PDR. However, there is no difference in microvascular complexity between HR and PDR. The inhomogeneity of the retinal microvascular tree (lacunarity) was higher in PDR compared to HR. Lacunarity and fractal dimension together quantitatively characterize microvascular geometry in the retina with higher specificity than fractal analysis alone.
高血压和糖尿病是血管疾病的可改变风险因素。它们导致微血管重构，并最终导致靶器官损伤。因此，开发非侵入性量化高血压和糖尿病对微血管影响的方法至关重要。本研究的两个目标是：1）通过盒计数分形维数和空隙分析来描述高血压性视网膜病变（HR）和增生性糖尿病性视网膜病变（PDR）中视网膜血管的几何复杂性和非均质性，2）确定这两个参数的组合是否可用于描述 HR 和 PDR 之间血管树几何形状的差异。从公开的 STARE 数据库扩展的视网膜图像集由我们的专家手动分割、验证，并提供给其他研究人员使用。健康的视网膜血管网络与 HR 和 PDR 相比具有更高的复杂性（分形维数）。然而，HR 和 PDR 之间的微血管复杂性没有差异。与 HR 相比，PDR 中视网膜微血管树的非均质性（空隙度）更高。与单独的分形分析相比，空隙度和分形维数一起定量地描述了视网膜中的微血管几何形状，具有更高的特异性。
