Retina blood vessel extraction based on Kirsch’s template method

Abstract

Analysis on the retina blood vessels from fundus images have been widely used in the medical community to detect the disorder condition in the blood vessels. An automated tracing of retina blood vessel can help to provide valuable computer-assisted diagnosis for the ophthalmic disorders. Thus, it helps to reduce the time for the ophthalmologist to analyses and diagnose the result of the fundus image of patient. The purpose of this research is to build an algorithm to trace the retina blood vessels. The method to be used in this research consist of two parts which are the pre-processing part and the feature extraction by using the Kirsch’s template. Combining the pre-processing at the early stage and feature extraction at the next stage is applied to extract the edges of the blood vessels. The proposed algorithm was verified by using two online databases, DRIVE and HRF to validate the performance measures. Hence, proposed method is capable to extract the retina blood vessel and give the accuracy of 0.7917, the sensitivity of 0.9077 and the specificity of 0.7215. In conclusion, the extraction of the blood vessels is highly recommended as the early screening stage for the eye diseases beneficially.