A Review on the Extraction of Quantitative Retinal Microvascular Image Feature <s> AV Nicking Observation. <s> The Rotterdam Study is a prospective cohort study ongoing since 1990 in the city of Rotterdam in The Netherlands. The study targets cardiovascular, endocrine, hepatic, neurological, ophthalmic, psychiatric and respiratory diseases. As of 2008, 14,926 subjects aged 45 years or over comprise the Rotterdam Study cohort. The findings of the Rotterdam Study have been presented in close to a 1,000 research articles and reports (see www.epib.nl/rotterdamstudy). This article gives the rationale of the study and its design. It also presents a summary of the major findings and an update of the objectives and methods. <s> BIB001 </s> A Review on the Extraction of Quantitative Retinal Microvascular Image Feature <s> AV Nicking Observation. <s> Retinal arteriovenous (AV) nicking is one of the prominent and significant microvascular abnormalities. It is characterized by the decrease in the venular caliber at both sides of an artery-vein crossing. Recent research suggests that retinal AV nicking is a strong predictor of eye diseases such as branch retinal vein occlusion and cardiovascular diseases such as stroke. In this study, we present a novel method for objective and quantitative AV nicking assessment. From the input retinal image, the vascular network is first extracted using the multiscale line detection method. The crossover point detection method is then performed to localize all AV crossing locations. At each detected crossover point, the four vessel segments, two associated with the artery and two associated with the vein, are identified and two venular segments are then recognized through the artery-vein classification method. The vessel widths along the two venular segments are measured and analyzed to compute the AV nicking severity of that crossover. The proposed method was validated on 47 high-resolution retinal images obtained from two population-based studies. The experimental results indicate a strong correlation between the computed AV nicking values and the expert grading with a Spearman correlation coefficient of 0.70. Sensitivity was 77% and specificity was 92% (Kappa κ = 0.70) when comparing AV nicking detected using the proposed method to that detected using a manual grading method, performed by trained photographic graders. <s> BIB002
AV nicking or AV nipping is abnormality phenomenon observed in the retinal microvascular structure during ophthalmological imaging which shows the characteristics view of crossing a small artery over a vein. Due to this arteriovenous crossing, the vein inflates either side of artery cross-section point. In several types of research related to retinal imaging, AV nicking has been found as the early indicator of eye-related diseases such as BRVO, diabetes, hypertension, and acute stroke BIB002 BIB001  . Figure 2 shows the normal and affected AV crossing scenario. The study of BIB002 proposed a computer-based algorithm to calculate the AV nicking severity applying the image processing techniques like image acquisition, segmentation, artery-vein classification method, and method for measuring vessel width. They validated this experiment on 47 high-resolution retinal images that were obtained from two different population-based studies. The AV nicking values obtained from this research showed a great correlation with expert grading and the accuracy of this finding is 88-89% which clarifies that severe and moderate AV nicking can be detected more precisely BIB002 .