Parabolic Modeling of the Major Temporal Arcade in Retinal Fundus Images

Monitoring measurements of the openness of the major temporal arcade (MTA) and how they change over time could facilitate improved diagnosis and optimized treatment of retinopathy. We propose methods for the detection, modeling, and measurement of the openness of the MTA, including Gabor filters to detect retinal vessels and the Hough transform to detect and parameterize parabolic forms. Results obtained with 40 images of the Digital Retinal Images for Vessel Extraction database, compared with traces of the MTA drawn by an expert ophthalmologist and a retinal specialist, indicate a low mean distance to the closest point of about 12 pixels (0.24 mm). The proposed methods should facilitate quantitative analysis of the MTA and overcome limitations associated with subjective manual analysis.