Blood vessel extraction from fundus image

Abstract

Almost 6.5 million people are affected due to glaucoma, diabetics every year in the USA (CDC, Diabetic retinopathy. National for chronic disease prevention and health promotion [Online]. Atlanta, GA [1]). The paper presents a computer-aided blood vessel detection from fundus imaging. This is mainly necessary for premature baby and diabetic patient (Karperien et al. Clin Ophthalmol 2(1):109 [2]). By proper screening of the vessel of patients, the medicine can be modified accordingly. For this case, DRIVE database (Staal et al. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 23(4):501–509 [3]) is chosen. And this detection scheme is fully automated and initially based on top-hat filtering on the input image. Iteratively, region growing and median filtering are applied on the initial segmented output and result in 94.02% accuracy when compared with the ground truth. Diabetic retinopathy analysis and retinal vessel tortuosity in premature infants can be determined using the proposed approach in this paper.