Retinalysis-Vascx: An Explainable Software Toolbox for the Extraction of Retinal Vascular Biomarkers From Color Fundus Images.

PURPOSE: Automatic extraction of retinal vascular biomarkers from color fundus images (CFIs) is crucial for large-scale studies of the retinal vasculature. We present VascX, an open-source software toolbox that extracts biomarkers from CFI artery-vein segmentations.

METHODS

From a color fundus image, VascX computes artery and vein segmentation masks, extracts their centerlines, builds undirected and directed vessel graphs, and resolves vessel segments into longer vessels. A comprehensive set of biomarkers is derived, including vascular density, central retinal equivalents (CREs), and tortuosity. Spatially localized biomarkers may be calculated over grids placed relative to the fovea and optic disc.

RESULTS

Our test-retest reproducibility analysis on repeat imaging of the same eye by different devices shows that most VascX biomarkers have moderate to excellent agreement (intraclass correlation coefficient > 0.5), with important differences in the level of robustness of different biomarkers. Our analyses of biomarker sensitivity to image perturbations and heuristic parameter values support these differences and further characterize VascX biomarkers.

CONCLUSIONS

VascX provides an explainable and flexible biomarker extraction toolbox that complements segmentation to produce reliable retinal vascular biomarkers. Our graph-based biomarker computation stages support reproducible, region-aware measurements suited for large-scale clinical and epidemiological research.

TRANSLATIONAL RELEVANCE: VascX supports oculomics research by enabling easy extraction of existing biomarkers and rapid experimentation with new biomarkers. Its robustness and computational efficiency facilitate scalable deployment in large databases. VascX is released via GitHub and PyPI with comprehensive documentation and examples to facilitate adoption by ophthalmic researchers and clinicians.