Computer Vision News - April 2023

41 Ylenia Giarratano Ylenia Giarratano is a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She speaks to us about the innovative work Miguel’s lab is doing using retinal imaging as a window into the health of other organs. Retinal imaging is a fascinating field because the eyes are a window into the human body’s inner workings, allowing us to observe the vascular system in vivo. This imaging technique is not restricted to studying ocular diseases but can also be employed to investigate other medical conditions with a vascular component . “ In my work, I use one of the most recent retinal imaging technologies: optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA), ” Ylenia tells us. “ This device allows us to visualize the tiniest vessels in our eyes, so it provides images at a microscopic level, going well beyond the common standard in retinal imaging tools. ” Ylenia has been developing a new methodology for analyzing thevasculature captured in OCTA images. She is building a pipeline in which machine learning tools pre-process the image, including a U-Net architecture for segmenting the blood vessels , some concepts borrowed from graph theory to model the vasculature, and then implementing a broad spectrum