Fig 1.
Color variation in two samples stained with Masson’s trichrome.
Fig 2.
Flow chart of image pre-processing stage.
Fig 3.
(A) Vessel wall image; (B) Histogram of the lightness component.
Fig 4.
(A) Tissue folds detected; (B) Blood residues detected; (C) Lightness component of the contrast-enhanced image after removing defects; (D) Binary image thresholded by Otsu’s method; (E) DBSCAN algorithm output; (F) Vessel wall area image.
Fig 5.
Flow chart of image feature extraction stage.
Fig 6.
Process of the k-means algorithm.
(A) Input image; (B) SMF component detected; (C) ECM component detected; (D) SMF area; (E) ECM area.
Fig 7.
Characteristics of the database.
Fig 8.
Normalized measures of different vein segment types.
Table 1.
Execution time of permutation test (n1 = 22 and n2 = 20).
Table 2.
p-values from experiments.
Fig 9.
State-of-the-art in varicose vein studies.
1 h: healthy sample, c: competent sample, i: incompetent sample 2 vv: varicose samples (competent and incompetent). <s or >s: the difference indicated is statistically significant (α = 0.05). < or >: the difference indicated is not statistically significant.