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Approved research

Statistical modeling of retinal features and their association with disease relevant phenotypes

Principal Investigator: Mr Mattia Tomasoni
Approved Research ID: 43805
Approval date: July 4th 2019

Lay summary

In this 3 years research project, we propose to investigate whether measurements extracted from pictures of the retina of the human eye, such as the thickness of blood vessels, can help doctors (opthamologists) in the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases: the retina is in fact the only part of the cardiovascular system that can be easily inspected (without the need to perform surgery). We will employ computer algorithms to automatically extract measurements form the retina images and test whether we can predict risk factors (for example whether a person smokes) and the insurgence of related diseases (for example, hear attack). Ideally, we would like to be able to help the doctor perform an early diagnosis: this way, the patient would be warned in advance and could decide to improve her or his lifestyle accordingly to minimise the likeliness of falling ill. Finally, since we have access to pictures of the retina of a group of people of Swiss nationality, we would like to test how methods developed on data from Switzerland can be applied to data gathered in the UK.