A novel methodology for vessel extraction from retinal fundus image and detection of neovascularization

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Vessel extraction from the retinal fundus images plays a significant role in ophthalmologic disease diagnosis. Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy (PDR) is the...     

Automatic detection and characterisation of retinal vessel tree bifurcations and crossovers in eye fundus images

Analysis of retinal vessel tree characteristics is an important task in medical diagnosis, specially in cases of diseases like vessel occlusion, hypertension or diabetes. The detection and classification of feature points in the arteriovenous eye tree will increase the information about the structure allowing its use for medical diagnosis. In this work a method for detection and classification of retinal vessel tree feature points is presented. The method applies and combines imaging techniques such as filters or morphologic operations to obtain an adequate structure for the detection. Classification is performed by analysing the feature points environment. Detection and classification of feature points is validated using the VARIA database. Experimental results are compared to previous approaches showing a much higher specificity in the characterisation of feature points while slightly increasing the sensitivity. These results provide a more reliable methodology for retinal structure analysis.     

视网膜血管图像特征点自动提取和分类

由动静脉血管组成的眼底视网膜血管结构的特征点是预测心血管疾病、图像分析和生物学应用的重要特征。把角点检测引入到视网膜血管分叉点和交叉点提取中,利用边缘检测算子得到二值边缘图像,采用基于累加点到弦的距离（CPDA）的角点检测方法得到候选特征点,再根据视网膜血管图像的拓扑结构设计自适应矩形探测器对候选特征点进行删减和分类。实验结果表明,基于CPDA的角点检测和自适应矩形探测器的方法有效地实现了节点的提取和分类。     

A personal identification system using retinal vasculature in retinal fundus images

The characteristics of human body such as fingerprint, face, hand palm and iris are measured, recorded and identified by performing comparison using biometric devices. Even though it has not seen widespread acceptance yet, retinal identification based on retinal vasculatures in retina provides the most secure and accurate authentication means among biometric systems. Using retinal images taken from individuals, retinal identification is employed in environments such as nuclear research centers and facilities, weapon factories, where extremely high security measures are needed. The superiority of this method stems from the fact that retina is unique to every human being and it would not be changed during human life. Adversely, other identification approaches such as fingerprint, face, palm and iris recognition, are all vulnerable in that those characteristics can be corrupted via plastic surgeries and other changes. In this study we propose an alternate personal identification system based on retinal vascular network in retinal images, which tolerates scale, rotation and translation in comparison. In order to accurately identify a person our new approach first segments vessel structure and then employ similarity measurement along with the tolerations. The developed system, tested on about four hundred images, presents over 95% of success which is quite promising.     

Computer-aided retinal vessel segmentation in retinal images: convolutional neural networks

In medicine, diagnosis is as important as treatment. Retinal blood vessels are the most easily visible vessels in the whole body, and therefore, play a key role in the diagnosis of numerous diseases and eye disorders. Systematic and eye diseases cause morphologic variations, such as the growing, narrowing or branching of retinal blood vessels. Imaging-based screening of retinal blood vessels plays an important role in the identification and follow-up of eye diseases. Therefore, automatic retinal vessel segmentation can be used to diagnose and monitor those diseases. Computer-aided algorithms are required for the analysis of progression of eye diseases. This study proposes a hybrid method that provides a combination of pre-processing and data augmentation methods with a deep learning model. Pre-processing was used to solve the irregular clarification problems and to form a contrast between the background and retinal blood vessels. After pre-processing step, a convolutional neural network (CNN) was designed and then trained for the extraction of retinal blood vessels. In the training phase, data augmentation was performed to improve training performance. The CNN was trained and tested in the DRIVE database, which is commonly used in retinal blood vessel segmentation and publicly available for studies in this area. Results showed that the proposed system extracted vessels with a sensitivity of 77.78%, specificity of 97,84%, precision of 84.17% and accuracy of 95.27%.

This study also compared the results to those of previous studies. The comparison showed that the proposed method is an efficient and successful method for extracting retinal blood vessels. Moreover, the pre-processing phases improved the system performance. We believe that the proposed method and results will make contribution to the literature.

     

Hard exudate detection in retinal fundus images using supervised learning

Neural Computing and Applications - The patients with diabetes have a chance to develop diabetic retinopathy (DR) which affects to the eyes. DR can cause blindness if the patients do not control...     

Minimising retinal vessel artefacts in optical coherence tomography images

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is commonly used to investigate the layers of the retina including retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE). OCT images are altered by vessels on the retinal surface producing artefacts. We propose a new approach to compensate for these artefacts and enhance quality of OCT images. A total of 28 (20 normal and 8 glaucoma subjects) OCT images were obtained using Spectralis (Heidelberg, Germany). Shadows were detected along the image and compensated by the A-Scan intensity difference from surrounding non-affected areas. Images were then segmented and the area and thickness of RNFL and RPE were measured and compared. 10 subjects were tested twice to determine the effect of this on reproducibility of measurements. Shadow-suppressed images reflected the profile of the retinal layers more closely when assessed qualitatively, minimising distortion. The segmentation of RNFL and RPE thickness demonstrated a mean change of 2.4% ± 1 and 6% ± 1 from the original images. Much larger changes were observed in areas with vessels. Reproducibility of RNFL thickness was improved, specifically in the higher density vessel location, i.e. inferior and superior. Therefore, OCT images can be enhanced by an image processing procedure. Vessel artefacts may cause errors in assessment of RNFL thickness and are a source of variability, which has clinical implications for diseases such as glaucoma where subtle changes in RNFL need to be monitored accurately over time.     

A new convolutional neural network model for peripapillary atrophy area segmentation from retinal fundus images

Peripapillary atrophy (PPA) is a clinical finding, which reflects the atrophy of retina layer and retinal pigment epithelium. The size of PPA area is a useful medical indicator, as it is highly associated with many diseases such as glaucoma and myopia. Therefore, separating the PPA area from retinal images, which is called PPA area segmentation, is very important. It is a challenging task, because PPA areas are irregular and non-uniform, and their contours are blurry and change gradually. To solve these issues, we transform the PPA area segmentation task into a task of segmenting another two areas with relatively regular and uniform shapes, and then propose a novel multi-task fully convolutional network (MFCN) model to jointly extract them from retinal images. Meanwhile, we take edge continuity of the target area into consideration. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, we conduct experiments on images with PPA areas labelled by experts and achieve an average precision of 0.8928, outperforming the state-of-the-art models. To demonstrate the application of PPA segmentation in medical research, we apply PPA related features based on the segmented PPA area on differentiating glaucomatous and physiologic large cup cases. Experiment conducted on real datasets confirms the effectiveness of using these features for glaucoma diagnosis.     

基于改进区域生长的遥感影像道路提取

提出一种改进区域生长法的遥感影像中道路提取方法。对遥感影像进行[K]均值聚类,实现道路区域和非道路区域的初步分离,并获取区域生长的基准值,按照图像特征计算出区域生长的阈值。依据对道路特性的分析,设计了9个道路路口模型。根据设计的道路路口模型,对区域生长法进行了改进,使得道路的提取按照道路路口模型自动增长。最后通过数学形态学的手段对道路进行优化。实验结果表明使用提出方法所提取道路区域更加完整。     

A novel optic disc detection scheme on retinal images

Robust and effective optic disc detection is a necessary processing component in automatic retinal screening systems. In this paper, optic disc localization is achieved by a novel illumination correction operation, and contour segmentation is completed by a supervised gradient vector flow snake (SGVF snake) model. Conventional GVF snake is not sufficient to segment contour due to vessel occlusion and fuzzy disc boundaries. In view of this reason, the SGVF snake is extended in each time of deformation iteration, so that the contour points can be classified and updated according to their corresponding feature information. The classification relies on the feature vector extraction and the statistical information generated from training images. This approach is evaluated by means of two publicly available databases, Digital Retinal Images for Vessel Extraction (DRIVE) database and Structured Analysis of the Retina (STARE) database, of color retinal images. The experimental results show that the overall performance is with 95% correct optic disc localization from the two databases and 91% disc boundaries are correctly segmented by the SGVF snake algorithm.     

基于眼底图像不同彩色通道的出血特征提取

针对眼底出血图像中出血形态各异、干扰目标多的特性,为提高出血检测精度,同时降低非出血目标引起的干扰,提出了一种基于眼底图像三个彩色通道的出血特征提取方法。该方法利用眼底出血图像在不同彩色通道的表现特性,统计和分析相关性状的像素值特性,并依据出血部分的统计特性设定提取阈值提取出血;使用多尺度顶帽变换和血管密度特征定位血管和黄斑;最后利用不用图像间的逻辑关系针对性去除血管、黄斑干扰,实现了出血区域的自动提取和干扰目标的排除。仿真结果表明,所提方法能够相对完整和准确地提取眼底图像出血目标,且时间效率高。     

A quantum mechanics-based algorithm for vessel segmentation in retinal images

Blood vessel segmentation is an important step in retinal image analysis. It is one of the steps required for computer-aided detection of ophthalmic diseases. In this paper, a novel quantum mechanics-based algorithm for retinal vessel segmentation is presented. The algorithm consists of three major steps. The first step is the preprocessing of the images to prepare the images for further processing. The second step is feature extraction where a set of four features is generated at each image pixel. These features are then combined using a nonlinear transformation for dimensionality reduction. The final step is applying a recently proposed quantum mechanics-based framework for image processing. In this step, pixels are mapped to quantum systems that are allowed to evolve from an initial state to a final state governed by Schrödinger’s equation. The evolution is controlled by the Hamiltonian operator which is a function of the extracted features at each pixel. A measurement step is consequently performed to determine whether the pixel belongs to vessel or non-vessel classes. Many functional forms of the Hamiltonian are proposed, and the best performing form was selected. The algorithm is tested on the publicly available DRIVE database. The average results for sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy are 80.29, 97.34, and 95.83 %, respectively. These results are compared to some recently published techniques showing the superior performance of the proposed method. Finally, the implementation of the algorithm on a quantum computer and the challenges facing this implementation are introduced.     

An improved reversible data hiding scheme using best neighboring coding based on color images

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In this paper, an improved reversible data hiding (RDH) scheme, best neighboring coding (BNC), is proposed for vector quantization (VQ) compressed color images....     

An improved multimodal signal-image compression scheme with application to natural images and biomedical data

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In this paper, a new multimodal compression scheme is proposed with the aim of compressing jointly an image and a signal via a single codec. The key idea behind...     

改进U-Net型网络的遥感图像道路提取

目的 遥感图像道路提取在城市规划、交通管理、车辆导航和地图更新等领域中发挥了重要作用,但遥感图像受光照、噪声和遮挡等因素以及识别过程中大量相似的非道路目标干扰,导致提取高质量的遥感图像道路有很大难度。为此,提出一种结合上下文信息和注意力机制的U-Net型道路分割网络。方法 使用Resnet-34预训练网络作为编码器实现特征提取,通过上下文信息提取模块对图像的上下文信息进行整合,确保对道路的几何拓扑结构特征的提取;使用注意力机制对跳跃连接传递的特征进行权重调整,提升网络对于道路边缘区域的分割效果。结果 在公共数据集Deep Globe道路提取数据集上对模型进行测试,召回率和交并比指标分别达到0.847 2和0.691 5。与主流方法U-Net和CE-Net（context encoder network）等进行比较,实验结果表明本文方法在性能上表现良好,能有效提高道路分割的精确度。结论 本文针对遥感图像道路提取中道路结构不完整和道路边缘区域不清晰问题,提出一种结合上下文信息和注意力机制的遥感道路提取模型。实验结果表明该网络在遥感图像道路提取上达到良好效果,具有较高的研究和应用价值。     

An improved SCF iteration scheme

An easily implementable iteration scheme guaranteeing convergence under very lenient conditions is developed and implemented into the MNDO-program package. Calculations done using large atomic clusters obtained from modelling diamond and silicon surfaces show that this scheme is, with respect to the requirements of computer time and memory, superior to some of the other iteration methods successfully used in quantum chemical calculations.     

一种基于分片包标记的改进方案

分布式拒绝服务（DDoS）攻击已经对Internet安全构成巨大威胁。由于TCP/IP协议本身的缺陷以及Internet的无状态性,使受害者对攻击源的确定变得十分困难。在深入研究分片包标记方案的基础上,扩展了标记空间,设立了一个分组域来区分数据包来自于哪一分组的路由器。这样,在重构攻击路径时只需要少量的分片组合就可以验证一条边是否在实际的攻击路径中,从而缩短了收敛时间,并减少了误报数。     

转炉炉口序列火焰图像的特征提取

转炉中不同的铜的化学成分对应署不同的炉口火焰特征，本文先是对炉口序列火焰图像进行特征提取．具体过程是每次采两帧，时间间隔是1s．分别求出帧间差图像经过阈值分割出的像素总数和后一幅图像经过阈值分割出的火焰图像像素总数占整幅图像像素总数的百分比，然后融合后一幅图像的主元作为序列图像的特征。实验证明这种特征提取的方法在识别过程中能够得到较理想的识别效果。