Preliminary Clinical Evaluation of Semi-automated Nailfold Capillaroscopy in the Assessment of Patients with Raynaud's Phenomenon

Please cite this paper as: Murray, Feng, Moore, Allen, Taylor, and Herrick (2011). Preliminary Clinical Evaluation of Semi‐automated Nailfold Capillaroscopy in the Assessment of Patients with Raynaud’s Phenomenon. Microcirculation 18(6), 440–447. Objectives: Nailfold capillaroscopy is well established in screening patients with Raynaud’s phenomenon for underlying SSc‐spectrum disorders, by identifying abnormal capillaries. Our aim was to compare semi‐automatic feature measurement from newly developed software with manual measurements, and determine the degree to which semi‐automated data allows disease group classification. Methods: Images from 46 healthy controls, 21 patients with PRP and 49 with SSc were preprocessed, and semi‐automated measurements of intercapillary distance and capillary width, tortuosity, and derangement were performed. These were compared with manual measurements. Features were used to classify images into the three subject groups. Results: Comparison of automatic and manual measures for distance, width, tortuosity, and derangement had correlations of r = 0.583, 0.624, 0.495 (p