Written in Blood: Applying Shape Grammars to Retinal Vasculatures.

Purpose: Blood vessel networks within the retina are crucial for maintaining tissue perfusion and therefore good vision. Their complexity and unique patterns often require a steep learning curve for humans to identify trends and changes in the shape and topology of the networks, even though there exists much information important to identifying disease within them.

Methods: Through image processing, the vasculature is isolated from other features of the fundus images, forcing the viewer to focus on the complex vascular feature.