Widefield retinal scanning in diabetes and cardiovascular disease as a marker of cardiovascular impairment

Background

The retina offers opportunity for direct, non-invasive study of the human microvasculature and its relationship to cardiovascular disease risk factors. The main challenge is the identification of biomarkers, i.e. subtle changes to structural features such as vessel width, branching angles and vessel tortuosity as observed in retinal images.

The Clinical Research Centre, CRC, (www.tahsc.org), based at the University of Dundee includes state-of-the-art MRI and PET-CT clinical research scanners. In addition, the Centre is implementing ultra-widefield retinal imaging to develop biomarker discovery in cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

This process benefits from the University of Dundee’s unique collaboration with the University of Edinburgh and Optos plc (http://www.optos.com/), who are the leading medical technology company for the design, development, manufacturing and marketing of ultra-widefield retinal imaging technology.

Project Outline

The student will learn how to acquire retinal images using an Optos widefield ophthalmoscope in CRC. They will participate in the development of novel post processing algorithms and then implement processing and analysis of images to investigate potential biomarkers. Leveraging the existing clinical facilities in Dundee, Edinburgh, and St Andrews, the student will access a substantial repository of cross-linked image data and relate retinal biomarker data to MRI-derived indicators of cardiovascular disease. They will analyse relationships between retinal biomarkers, MRI indicators of cardiovascular disease and other risk factor data.

The studentship will also benefit from and contribute to an existing collaboration with the University of Dundee (School of Computing) and other international centres developing software (VAMPIRE) for automatic quantification of retinal features in digital images.