• International Journal of Contents
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.27-32
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• 2006

We present an effective algorithm for automatic tracing of retinal vessel structure and vascular landmark extraction of bifurcations and ending points. In this paper we deal with vascular patterns from RGB images for personal identification. Vessel tracing algorithms are of interest in a variety of biometric and medical application such as personal identification, biometrics, and ophthalmic disorders like vessel change detection. However eye surface vasculature tracing in RGB images has many problems which are subject to improper illumination, glare, fade-out, shadow and artifacts arising from reflection, refraction, and dispersion. The proposed algorithm on vascular tracing employs multi-stage processing of ten-layers as followings: Image Acquisition, Image Enhancement by gray scale retinal image enhancement, reducing background artifact and illuminations and removing interlacing minute characteristics of vessels, Vascular Structure Extraction by connecting broken vessels, extracting vascular structure using eight directional information, and extracting retinal vascular structure, and Vascular Landmark Extraction by extracting bifurcations and ending points. The results of automatic retinal vessel extraction using jive different thresholds applied 34 eye images are presented. The results of vasculature tracing algorithm shows that the suggested algorithm can obtain not only robust and accurate vessel tracing but also vascular landmarks according to thresholds.

• Korean Journal of Veterinary Research
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.915-918
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• 1996

This study was performed to investigate the normal ocular fundus in 30 Korean native goats. The shape of two peaks of a mountain was shown in the tapetal fundus which was mostly greenish-blue color. The nontapetal fundus which was differentiated from the tapetal fundus, was generally a uniform shade with dark blue. The optic disc was nearly round and varied in color : orange, gray, tan and various combinations. It was mostly located at the junctional area of the nontapetal and the tapetal fundus. In the retinal vasculature, three or four major arterioles and two or three major venules emerged from the optic disc and the arterioles could be distinguished from the venules. The superior arteriole and venule in the tapetal fundus did not twist each other.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.119-128
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• 2014

The appearance of retinal blood vessels is an important diagnostic indicator of serious disease, such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. Automatic segmentation of the retinal vasculature is a primary step towards automatic assessment of the retinal blood vessel features. This paper presents an automated method for the enhancement and segmentation of blood vessels in fundus images. To decrease the influence of the optic disk, and emphasize the vessels for each retinal image, a multidirectional morphological top-hat transform with rotating structuring elements is first applied to the background homogenized retinal image. Then, an improved multiscale line detector is presented to produce a vessel response image, and yield the retinal blood vessel tree for each retinal image. Since different line detectors at varying scales have different line responses in the multiscale detector, the line detectors with longer length produce more vessel responses than the ones with shorter length; the improved multiscale detector combines all the responses at different scales by setting different weights for each scale. The methodology is evaluated on two publicly available databases, DRIVE and STARE. Experimental results demonstrate an excellent performance that approximates the average accuracy of a human observer. Moreover, the method is simple, fast, and robust to noise, so it is suitable for being integrated into a computer-assisted diagnostic system for ophthalmic disorders.

• Korean Journal of Pharmacognosy
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• v.50 no.1
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• pp.25-31
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• 2019

The zebrafish (Danio rerio) is an established model organism for several pathophysiological conditions which are related to human diseases. In this study, we tested the preventive effect of eight herbal extracts, which show the inhibitory effect of advanced glycation end products (AGEs) or aldose reductase (AR) in our previous study, on high glucose (HG)-induced retinal vessel dilation in larval zebrafish and analyzed the change of hyaloid vasculature. HG-induced zebrafish hyaloid vasculatures were significantly increased in the thickness compared to untreated zebrafish (P<0.001, n=6~10). Eight herbal extracts were found to have significant retinal vessel dilation on the inhibitory activity. Particularly, Brandisia hancei (twigs and fruits), Castanopsis orthacantha (leaves and twigs), Litsea japonica (leaves and twigs), Spenceria ramalana (whole plant), and Synedrella nodiflora (leaves and stems) showed potent inhibitory activity against retinal vessel dilation in HG-induced larval zebrafish.

• The Korean Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.231-240
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• 2023

Fabry disease is a lysosomal storage disorder characterized by the lysosomal accumulations of glycosphingolipids in a variety of cytotypes, which include endothelial cells. The disease is inherited and originates from an error in glycosphingolipid catabolism caused by insufficient α-galactosidase A activity, which causes uncontrolled progressive storage of intracellular globotriaosylceramide (Gb3) in the vasculature and extracellular accumulation of lyso-Gb3 (a deacetylated soluble form of Gb3). Necrosis can lead to inflammation, which exacerbates necrosis and creates a positive feedback loop that triggers necroinflammation. However, the role played by necroptosis, a form of programmed necrotic cell death, in the cell-to-cell inflammatory reaction between epithelial and endothelial cells is unclear. Thus, the present study was undertaken to determine whether lyso-Gb3 induces necroptosis and whether necroptosis inhibition protects endothelial dysfunction against lyso-Gb3 inflamed retinal pigment epithelial cells. We found lyso-Gb3 induced necroptosis of a retinal pigment epithelial cell line (ARPE-19) in an autophagy-dependent manner and that conditioned media (CM) from ARPE-19 cells treated with lyso-Gb3 induced the necroptosis, inflammation, and senescence of human umbilical vein endothelial cells. In addition, a pharmacological study showed CM from lyso-Gb3 treated ARPE-19 cells induced endothelial necroptosis, inflammation, and senescence were significantly inhibited by an autophagy inhibitor (3-MA) and by two necroptosis inhibitors (necrostatin and GSK-872), respectively. These results demonstrate lyso-Gb3 induces necroptosis via autophagy and suggest that lyso-Gb3 inflamed retinal pigment epithelial cells trigger endothelial dysfunction via the autophagy-dependent necroptosis pathway. This study suggests the involvement of a novel autophagy-dependent necroptosis pathway in the regulation of endothelial dysfunction in Fabry disease.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.28-30
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• 2006

Two patients presented with amaurosis fugax[AMF]. despite treatment with antiplatelet drugs and anticoagulants due to previous transient ischemic attacks. Angiography demonstrated severe stenosis in the cavernous and petrous internal carotid artery[ICA] respectively, with reduced flow in the ophthalmic artery[OA]. Endovascular stent placement in both patients resulted in normalization of the vessel lumen of the stenotic vessel segments. In addition, complete restoration of OA flow was noted immediately after stenting. Both patients showed no further episode of AMF over a follow-up period of 38 and 23 months respectively. Our clinical and angiographic findings suggest that hemodynamic Insufficiency in retinal vasculature caused by a stenosis of the cavernous or petrous ICA can be treated successfully by endovascular stent.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.183-192
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• 1991

Ophthalmoscopy following the intravenous injection of fluorescein has gained great diagnostic importance in ophthalmology. This technique provides sequential evaluation of the anatomic and physiologic status of the choroidal and retinal vasculature. In order to detect the changes between fluorescein ocular fundus image frames, the direct subtraction of the two frames is inadequate because of geometric distortions and background gray level differences in two images. In this study, a scheme for the correction of the geometric distortions is proposed. Precise control point coordinate values for transformation functions are manually determined after the process including a series of blood vessel detection and thinning, and one frame is mapped to another, and then a geometric distortion corrected image is obtained. When the corrected image is used in interframe change detections, a sucessful result is ensured.