Segmentation of the blood vessels and optic disk in retinal images.

Ana Salazar-Gonzalez,Djibril Kaba,Xiaohui Liu Xiaohui Liu,Yongmin Li Yongmin Li

doi:10.1109/jbhi.2014.2302749

Ana Salazar-Gonzalez, Djibril Kaba + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/jbhi.2014.2302749

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Abstract

Retinal image analysis is increasingly prominent as a nonintrusive diagnosis method in modern ophthalmology. In this paper, we present a novel method to segment blood vessels and optic disk in the fundus retinal images. The method could be used to support nonintrusive diagnosis in modern ophthalmology since the morphology of the blood vessel and the optic disk is an important indicator for diseases like diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and hypertension. Our method takes as first step the extraction of the retina vascular tree using the graph cut technique. The blood vessel information is then used to estimate the location of the optic disk. The optic disk segmentation is performed using two alternative methods. The Markov random field (MRF) image reconstruction method segments the optic disk by removing vessels from the optic disk region, and the compensation factor method segments the optic disk using the prior local intensity knowledge of the vessels. The proposed method is tested on three public datasets, DIARETDB1, DRIVE, and STARE. The results and comparison with alternative methods show that our method achieved exceptional performance in segmenting the blood vessel and optic disk.

Highlights

T HE segmentation of retinal image structures has been of great interest because it could be used as a nonintrusive diagnosis in modern ophthalmology
For the vessel segmentation method, we tested our algorithm on two public datasets, DRIVE [5] and STARE [2] with a total of 60 images
The DRIVE consists of 40 digital images which were captured from a Canon CR5 nonmydriatic 3CCD camera at 45◦ field of view (FOV)

Summary

Introduction

T HE segmentation of retinal image structures has been of great interest because it could be used as a nonintrusive diagnosis in modern ophthalmology. The morphology of the retinal blood vessel and the optic disk is an important structural indicator for assessing the presence and severity of retinal diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, hypertension, glaucoma, hemorrhages, vein occlusion, and neovascularization. To assess the diameter and tortuosity of the retinal blood vessel or the shape of the optic disk, manual planimetry has commonly been used by ophthalmologists, which is generally time consuming and prone to human error, especially when the vessel structures are complicated or a large number of images are acquired to be labeled by hand. A reliable automated method for retinal blood vessel and optic disk segmentation, Manuscript received August 21, 2013; revised January 16, 2014 and November 28, 2013; accepted January 17, 2014. She is with Access IS, Reading, RG6 1AZ, U.K

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