Retinal atlas statistics from color fundus images

An atlas provides a reference anatomic structure and an associated coordinate system. An atlas may be used in a variety of applications, including segmentation and registration, and can be used to characterize anatomy across a population. We present a method for generating an atlas of the human retina from 500 color fundus image pairs. Using color fundus image pairs, we register image pairs to obtain a larger anatomic field of view. Key retinal anatomic features are selected for atlas landmarks: disk center, fovea, and main vessel arch. An atlas coordinate system is defined based on the statistics of the landmarks. Images from the population are warped into the atlas space to produce a statistical retinal atlas which can be used for automatic diagnosis, concise indexing, semantic blending, etc.