Modeling of the Major Temporal Arcade using Genetic Algorithms and Orthogonal Polynomials

Nowadays eye diseases that are not treated in a timely manner can lead to blindness in the patient. Diabetic retinopathy and retinopathy of prematurity are a couple of conditions considered to be the main causes of blindness in both adults and children. The technique used to date to verify the status of the retina is a qualitative analysis by an ophthalmological expert of fundus images. However, this is entirely based on the experience acquired by the physician and being able to detect changes in the vascular structure of the retina is a great challenge which can be addressed through technology. This paper presents a novel method to carry out the numerical modeling of the major temporal arcade using orthogonal polynomials of Legendre, Chebyshev and Laguerre through a genetic algorithm that helps to determine the coefficients of the linear combination of each one. A set of twenty fundus images already outlined by an expert was used, which were processed by the algorithm, generating an adjustment curve on the set of pixels of the Major Temporal Arcade. The results obtained were compared with three existing methodologies in the literature by using two metrics, emerging the Legendre polynomials as the most suitable for modeling, as a consequence of the low values obtained in the metrics compared to the other methods.