A divide et impera strategy for automatic classification of retinal vessels into arteries and veins

The first pathologic alterations of the retina are seen in the vessel network. These modifications affect very differently arteries and veins, and the appearance and entity of the modification differ as the retinopathy becomes milder or more severe. In order to develop an automatic procedure for the diagnosis and grading of retinopathy, it is necessary to be able to discriminate arteries from veins. The problem is complicated by the similarity in the descriptive features of these two structures and by the contrast and luminosity variability of the retina. We developed a new algorithm for classifying the vessels, which exploits the peculiarities of retinal images. By applying a divide et impera approach that partitioned a concentric zone around the optic disc into quadrants, we were able to perform a more robust local classification analysis. The results obtained by the proposed technique were compared with those provided by a manual classification on a validation set of 443 vessels and reached an overall classification error of 12%, which reduces to 7% if only the diagnostically important retinal vessels are considered.