University of Padova

Alfredo Ruggeri
University of Padova

Department of Information Engineering

90 Researchers. 4.000 undergraduate and postgraduate students, more than 90 Ph.D. students and post-doctoral fellows. Research in Information Engineering, including the areas of Bioengineering, Computer Engineering, Electronics, Measurement Techniques, System Theory and Automation, Telecommunications.

Interests
Biomedical imaging / Retinal images / Corneal images /Image processing / Image analysis / Image segmentation

Project 1: ESR 2.1 Retinal vascular measurement: diagnostic feature extraction

This project is investigating families of diagnostic features that describe local and global characteristics of the retinal vasculature of interest across a range of medical conditions, and relate them to fundamental changes in the vasculature. Relevant features include those relating to geometry, e.g., tortuosity, vascular narrowing, angle of vessel bifurcation, fractal measures. Applications will be in the area of hypertensive and diabetic retinopathy and of retinopathy of prematurity (ROP).

Project 2: ESR 2.4 Conjunctiva vessel analysis

This project is focusing on analysis of conjunctiva vessels as an alternative to the retinal vasculature, correlate features of conjunctiva and retinal vessels to determine if they have related or different diagnostic potential, and determine if analytical techniques different from retina are appropriate. Techniques to estimate blood velocity in conjunctiva vessels will also be developed and clinically evaluated.

Major 5 Publications

L. Tramontan, E. Poletti, D. Fiorin, and A. Ruggeri. A web-based system for the quantitative and reproducible assessment of clinical indexes from the retinal vasculature. IEEE Trans Biomed Eng, 58(3):818-821, 2011.

F. Scarpa, X. Zheng, Y. Ohashi, A. Ruggeri. Automatic Evaluation of Corneal Nerve Tortuosity in Images from In-vivo Confocal Microscopy. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci, 52(9):6404-8, 2011.

E. Grisan, M. Foracchia, A. Ruggeri. A novel method for the automatic grading of retinal vessel tortuosity. IEEE Trans Med Imag, 27(3):310-9, Mar 2008.

M. Foracchia, E. Grisan, A. Ruggeri. Luminosity and contrast normalization in retinal images. Med Image Anal, 9/3:179-190, 2005.

M. Foracchia, E. Grisan, A. Ruggeri. Detection of optic disc in retinal images by means of a geometrical model of vessel structure. IEEE Trans Med Imag, 23:1189-1195, 2004.