Retinal Analysis
One of the most active fields of work in the VARPA Group is the ophtalmologic, in particular using eye fundus images (retinal images). These images are mostly granted by the Complejo Hospitalario Universitario of Santiago (CHUS), and consist in optic disc centered images and macula centered ones. This retinal images processing is a very interesting and demanding field having a lot of practical applications.
Most of the works in the VARPA Group in this field can be classified in two main scopes:
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Medical Applications.
Retinal images analysis provides us with tools playing an important role in the decision support process for some diseases diagnose. In several cases such as massive medical revisions for prevention of typical pathologies or the research in pharmacology effectiveness, the artifical vision processes allows us to automatize and facilitate key parts of the processes. In our group, many applications have been developed such as Optic Disc and Macula automatic location, early detection of red lesions and other symptons of disease etc.
With the aim of building an integrating tool that provides for the ophtalmologic research a set of automatized processes and a way to calculate, store and analyze the obtained results, the group has developed SIRIUS (System for the Integration of Retinal Images Understanding Services):
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Personal Authentication.
Retinal vessel tree is a suitable biometric pattern as it's unique for each individual, it's very hard to forge and, unless some pathologies arise, it doesn't change in time. In our group we have developed an authentication system based on this retinal vessel tree and we are currently working on the individual characterization based on the feature extraction from the vessel tree. This will allow to build an easily and more robust biometric pattern.
VARIA (VArpa Retinal Images for Authentication) Database