Retinal vessel tree segmentation using a deformable contour model

This paper presents an improved version of our specific methodology to detect the vessel tree in retinal angiographies. The automatic analysis of retinal vessel tree facilitates the computation of the arteriovenous index, which is essential for the diagnosis several eye diseases. The developed system is inspired in the classical snake but incorporating domain specific knowledge, such as blood vessels topological properties. It profits from the automatic localization of the optic disc, the vessel creases extraction and, as a recent innovation, the morphological vessel segmentation, all developed in our research group. After researching and testing our system, the parameter configuration has been enhanced. Significantly better results in the detection of arteriovenous structures are obtained, keeping a high efficiency, as shown by the systems performance evaluation on the publicly available DRIVE database.

keywords: Retinal vessels, retinal segmentation, deformable contour