[Fractal analysis of retinal vascular tree: segmentation and estimation methods].

Purpose: Although it has been proposed that retinal vasculature is fractal, no method of standardization has been performed for vascular segmentation or for dimension calculation, thus resulting in great variability among values of fractal dimensions. The present study was designed to determine if estimation of retinal vessel fractal dimensions is dependent on vascular segmentation and dimensional calculation methods.

Methods: Ten eye fundus images were segmented to extract their vascular trees by four computational methods ("multi-threshold", "scale-space", "pixel classification" and "ridge based detection").