Spatial analysis of photoreceptor mosaic from adaptive optics images of the human retina

The assessment of the structure of the photoreceptor mosaic in AO images needs methods to quantify the arrangement of the cells. For this purpose, a variety of geometric and statistical algorithms were developed to analyse the coordinates identifying the position of cone centroids. In particular, the most used metrics are cell density, the percentage of six-sided Voronoi cells and spacing metrics. The aim of this thesis is to study the arrangement of the parafoveal cone mosaic from AO flood illumination images with two different approaches: 1. The first approach is a global analysis of the spacing between cones by extraction of three frequently used spacing metrics; 2. The second approach is a local pointwise analysis of the tendencies of the cones for aggregation and repulsion at specific distance, by statistical point pattern analysis.