Blood Vessels in the Eye May Diagnose Parkinson's Disease
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Using an advanced machine-learning algorithm and fundus eye images, which depict the small blood vessels and more at the back of the eye, investigators are able to classify patients with Parkinson's disease compared against a control group.
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@sanai Researchers, under the direction of Ruogu Fang, PhD, director of the J. Crayton Pruitt Department of Biomedical Engineering's Smart Medical Informatics Learning and Evaluation Lab (SMILE), collected fundus eye images from 476 age- and gender-matched individuals, 238 diagnosed with Parkinson's and 238 control group images. Another set of 100 images were collected from the University of Florida database using green color channels (UKB-Green and UF-UKB Green) and used to improve vessel segmentation. Of these, 28 were controls and 72 from Parkinson's patients. Researchers added 44 more control images from the UK Biobank to complete the second age- and gender-matched dataset.