A survey on blood vessel segmentation methods in retinal images

Abstract

Diabetic Retinopathy occurs in patients who suffer from diabetes for many years and as a result of which the vision gets affected. The affect can be low to severe depending on the extent to which the disease has occurred. There are two stages of the disease. The early stage is Non proliferative diabetic retinopathy (NPDR) and later is Proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR). In NPDR, various problems may occur such as macular edema which is swelling in the central retina and retinal ischemia which occurs due to poor blood flow. In PDR, the advanced stage of NPDR, new blood vessels starts growing in the retina known as neovascularization. The extraction of retinal blood vessels if done at early stages can be very helpful in diagnosing the severity of the disease and accordingly the treatment can be followed. In later stages, treatment is not very effective. In this paper various blood vessel segmentation techniques are discussed. Besides segmentation techniques, retinal image enhancement techniques are also discussed. The evaluation of techniques is done on publically available databases DRIVE and STARE. These databases contain retinal images along with the ground truth images which are accurately marked by the experts for the purpose of evaluation of the techniques. The paper also discusses various metrics which are frequently used for the evaluation of image segmentation techniques.

Blood vessel segmentation algorithms — Review of methods, datasets and evaluation metrics

“…However, automatic or semi-automatic blood vessel segmentation could assist clinicians and, therefore, are topics of great interest in medical research, as demonstrated by the high amount of papers annually published in this field. Indeed, an extensive literature already exists on vessel segmentation and in the past years different reviews on vessel segmentation algorithms have been published, such as [13], [14], [12], [15], [16], [17], [18] and [19]. However, due to the strong development in the field, updated reviews are required to analyze and summarize the actual state of the art.…”

Retinal Vessels Segmentation Techniques and Algorithms: A Survey

“…In general, vessels (vessels structure-like) segmentation occupy a remarkable place in medical image segmentation field [1][2][3][4]; retinal vessels segmentation belongs to this category where a broad variety of algorithms and methodologies have been developed and implemented for the sake of automatic identification, localization and extraction of retinal vasculature structures [5][6][7][8][9][10]. In this paper, we have presented a review that covers and categorizes early and recent literature methodologies and techniques, with the major focus on the detection and segmentation of retinal vasculature structures in two-dimensional retinal fundus images.…”

An Effective Retinal Blood Vessel Segmentation by Using Automatic Random Walks Based on Centerline Extraction

“…There are a lot of previous works on extracting blood vessels in retinal images, which can be classified into both unsupervised and supervised methods [3][4][5][6]. Unsupervised methods mainly include matched filter responses, mathemat-ical morphology-based techniques, model-based locally adaptive thresholding, and vessel tracking.…”