Title :
Retinal vessel segmentation on SLO image
Author :
Xu, Juan ; Ishikawa, Hiroshi ; Wollstein, Gadi ; Schuman, Joel S.
Author_Institution :
UPMC Eye Center, Eye and Ear Institute, Ophthalmology and Visual Science Research Center, Dept. of Ophthalmology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, PA, USA
Abstract :
A scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO) image, taken from optical coherence tomography (OCT), usually has lower global/local contrast and more noise compared to the traditional retinal photograph, which makes the vessel segmentation challenging work. A hybrid algorithm is proposed to efficiently solve these problems by fusing several designed methods, taking the advantages of each method and reducing the error measurements. The algorithm has several steps consisting of image preprocessing, thresholding probe and weighted fusing. Four different methods are first designed to transform the SLO image into feature response images by taking different combinations of matched filter, contrast enhancement and mathematical morphology operators. A thresholding probe algorithm is then applied on those response images to obtain four vessel maps. Weighted majority opinion is used to fuse these vessel maps and generate a final vessel map. The experimental results showed that the proposed hybrid algorithm could successfully segment the blood vessels on SLO images, by detecting the major and small vessels and suppressing the noises. The algorithm showed substantial potential in various clinical applications. The use of this method can be also extended to medical image registration based on blood vessel location.
Keywords :
Biomedical imaging; Biomedical optical imaging; Blood vessels; Design methodology; Image segmentation; Laser noise; Optical filters; Optical noise; Probes; Retinal vessels; SLO image; Vessel segmentation; hybrid algorithm; retina; Algorithms; Humans; Imaging, Three-Dimensional; Ophthalmoscopy; Retinal Vessels; Tomography, Optical Coherence;
Conference_Titel :
Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2008. EMBS 2008. 30th Annual International Conference of the IEEE
Conference_Location :
Vancouver, BC
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-1814-5
Electronic_ISBN :
1557-170X
DOI :
10.1109/IEMBS.2008.4649646