22 Jul 21. MIUA 2021 runner-up award

Congratulations to Darwon Rashid, PhD student at the University of Edinburgh who was awarded runner up for the student presentation & paper award at the MIUA 2021.

At the recent Medical Image Understanding & Analysis (MIUA) conference, Darwon Rashid, PhD student on the MRC Precision Medicine CDT Programme with the University of Edinburgh was awarded runner up for the student presentation & paper award at the MIUA 2021, for the following paper:

“Reproducibility of retinal vascular phenotypes obtained with Optical coherence tomography angiography: importance of vessel segmentation”

Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) is a non-invasive imaging method that can visualize the finest vascular networks in the human retina. OCTA image analysis has been successfully applied to the investigation of retinal vascular diseases of the eye & other systemic conditions that may manifest in the eye.

To characterize & distinguish OCTA images from different pathologies, it is important to identify quantitative metrics & phenotypes that have high reproducibility & are not overly susceptible to the effects of imaging artifacts. This paper demonstrates the reproducibility of several recently demonstrated candidate OCTA quantitative metrics:

• Mean curvature & tortuosity of the whole, foveal, superior, nasal, inferior, & temporal regions;
• Foveal & parafoveal vessel skeleton density; &
• Foveal avascular zone area & acircularity index.

This paper also highlights the importance of vessel segmentation choice on reproducibility using two different segmentation methods:

• Optimally oriented flux; &
• Frangi filter.

Darwon’s research project for his PhD involves the use of non-invasive approaches to investigating the vascular footprint of Alzheimer’s disease for early disease detection.

The project involves cutting-edge image processing & computational modelling methods in order to discover early changes in retinal microvascular structure associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

The project will take advantage of existing OCTA datasets in Edinburgh & through collaboration with Duke University, which are world-leading. The main objective is to detect Alzheimer’s disease before the onset of symptoms & design the computational pipelines & protocols necessary to facilitate their use in future large-scale clinical studies.

We asked Darwon his thoughts on receiving the runner up award.

“I was very surprised to even get an award. This was a huge confidence boost for me personally. I started my first year online & have been doing everything online. A problem for me with not being in the office or around an appropriate environment is that I do not really know how I am doing for I am isolated & the imposter syndrome in me comes out. I feel alone as a student & to get any kind of award for the work I’ve done is very reassuring that I am on the right track & that what I am doing isn’t for nothing.

Many thanks to everyone who helped getting this manuscript together, it would have not been possible otherwise.”