Identification and reconnection of interrupted vessels in retinal vessel segmentation

V S Joshi; M K Garvin; J M Reinhardt; M D Abramoff

doi:10.1109/ISBI.2011.5872665

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Conference proceeding

Identification and reconnection of interrupted vessels in retinal vessel segmentation

V S Joshi, M K Garvin, J M Reinhardt and M D Abramoff

2011 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro, pp.1416-1420

03/2011

DOI: 10.1109/ISBI.2011.5872665

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Abstract

The morphology of retinal blood vessels contains valuable information for the diagnosis of retinal dysfunctions. The vessels can be segmented from color fundus images but the connectivity of the segmented vessels is not always preserved because of low contrast, imaging noise and artifacts. If a continuous vessel is interpreted as multiple disjoint vessel segments, the morphological measurements such as tortuosity may not be representative of true properties of retinal vessels. We describe an algorithm to identify the vessel segment interruptions based on connected component analysis and then reconnect them using a graph based approach. The proposed method was evaluated on a dataset of 25 vessel segmentation images resulting into a reconnection performance measure of 81.63% compared to the gold standard obtained by the manual reconnection process. Our approach has allowed the complete vessel tree to be connected, and has potential in providing improved morphological measurements.

Image segmentation

fundus

retina

vessel

Blood vessels

interruption

Retinal vessels

connection

Joining processes

Pixel

Biomedical imaging

Details

Title: Subtitle: Identification and reconnection of interrupted vessels in retinal vessel segmentation
Creators: V S Joshi - Biomed. Eng., Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
M K Garvin - Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
J M Reinhardt - Biomed. Eng., Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
M D Abramoff - Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
Resource Type: Conference proceeding
Publication Details: 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro, pp.1416-1420
Publisher: IEEE
DOI: 10.1109/ISBI.2011.5872665
ISSN: 1945-7928
eISSN: 1945-8452
Language: English
Date published: 03/2011
Academic Unit: Fraternal Order of Eagles Diabetes Research Center; Electrical and Computer Engineering; Roy J. Carver Department of Biomedical Engineering; Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences; Radiology
Record Identifier: 9984060660302771

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