%0 Journal Article
%T A novel method for blood vessel detection from retinal images
%A Lili Xu
%A Shuqian Luo
%J BioMedical Engineering OnLine
%D 2010
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1475-925x-9-14
%X In this paper, we present a novel method to segment retinal blood vessels to overcome the variations in contrast of large and thin vessels. This method uses adaptive local thresholding to produce a binary image then extract large connected components as large vessels. The residual fragments in the binary image including some thin vessel segments (or pixels), are classified by Support Vector Machine (SVM). The tracking growth is applied to the thin vessel segments to form the whole vascular network.The proposed algorithm is tested on DRIVE database, and the average sensitivity is over 77% while the average accuracy reaches 93.2%.In this paper, we distinguish large vessels by adaptive local thresholding for their good contrast. Then identify some thin vessel segments with bad contrast by SVM, which can be lengthened by tracking. This proposed method can avoid heavy computation and manual intervention.The retina is the only location where blood vessels can be directly captured non-invasively in vivo. Over the past decade, the retinal image analysis has been widely used in medical community for diagnosing and monitoring the progression of diseases [1,2]. And retinal blood vessels are important structures in retinal images. The information obtained from the examination of retinal blood vessels offers many useful parameters for the diagnosis or evaluation of ocular or systemic diseases. For example, the retinal blood vessel has shown some morphological changes such as diameter, length, branching angles or tortuosity for vascular or nonvascular pathology, such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases [3]. Blood vessels are also used as landmarks for registration of retinal images of a same patient gathered from different sources. Sometimes, retinal blood vessel must be excluded for easy detection of pathological lesions like exudates or microaneurysms. In all cases, proper segmentation of retinal blood vessel is crucial.Actually, automatic detection of the blood
%U http://www.biomedical-engineering-online.com/content/9/1/14