Ana Villaplana-Velasco, a researcher at the Usher and Roslin Institutes at the University of Edinburgh explains that changes in the vascularity of the retina can offer different insights into a human’s health.
She and her colleagues therefore decided to use retinal imaging, a technique considered to be non-invasive,
just for this purpose. Specifically, the scientists analyzed the complex branching patterns of the retinal vascular system by analyzing data included in a British biobank that
they cover medical records and lifestyle of 500,000 people.
Eventually, the researchers found that a particular size of the retina, called the fractal size, along with various blood vessel branching patterns, may be related to the risk of coronary heart disease and therefore myocardial infarction.
A surprising discovery
which in fact created a new evaluation model that allows to classify human subjects with the highest risk of myocardial infarction better than other similar models previously created with a prediction