病变视网膜图像血管网络的自动分割

现有的视网膜血管分割方法大多只针对正常的视网膜图像进行分割,不能实现对发生病变的视网膜图像的分割.为此,提出了一种新的病变视网膜图像血管网络分割方法.该方法首先采用向量场散度方法获得病变视网膜图像中大部分血管的中心线,然后计算出中心线上各像素点的方向信息并采用改进的定向局部对比度方法检测出中心线两侧的血管像素,最后对获得的血管段末端进行反向外推追踪,分割出最终的血管网络.通过对通用的STARE眼底图像库中所有病变视网膜图像的实验仿真,结果表明本文算法获得了0.9426的ROC曲线面积和0.9502的准确率,算法性能明显优于Hoover算法和Benson等提出的算法.此外,本文算法还克服了Benson算法的局限性,对不同类型的病变视网膜图像都具有较好的鲁棒性.     

Detection of optic disc in retinal images by means of a geometrical model of vessel structure

We present here a new method to identify the position of the optic disc (OD) in retinal fundus images. The method is based on the preliminary detection of the main retinal vessels. All retinal vessels originate from the OD and their path follows a similar directional pattern (parabolic course) in all images. To describe the general direction of retinal vessels at any given position in the image, a geometrical parametric model was proposed, where two of the model parameters are the coordinates of the OD center. Using as experimental data samples of vessel centerline points and corresponding vessel directions, provided by any vessel identification procedure, model parameters were identified by means of a simulated annealing optimization technique. These estimated values provide the coordinates of the center of OD. A Matlab prototype implementing this method was developed. An evaluation of the proposed procedure was performed using the set of 81 images from the STARE project, containing images from both normal and pathological subjects. The OD position was correctly identified in 79 out of 81 images (98%), even in rather difficult pathological situations.     

Automated measurement of the arteriolar-to-venular width ratio in digital color fundus photographs

A decreased ratio of the width of retinal arteries to veins [arteriolar-to-venular diameter ratio (AVR)], is well established as predictive of cerebral atrophy, stroke and other cardiovascular events in adults. Tortuous and dilated arteries and veins, as well as decreased AVR are also markers for plus disease in retinopathy of prematurity. This work presents an automated method to estimate the AVR in retinal color images by detecting the location of the optic disc, determining an appropriate region of interest (ROI), classifying vessels as arteries or veins, estimating vessel widths, and calculating the AVR. After vessel segmentation and vessel width determination, the optic disc is located and the system eliminates all vessels outside the AVR measurement ROI. A skeletonization operation is applied to the remaining vessels after which vessel crossings and bifurcation points are removed, leaving a set of vessel segments consisting of only vessel centerline pixels. Features are extracted from each centerline pixel in order to assign these a soft label indicating the likelihood that the pixel is part of a vein. As all centerline pixels in a connected vessel segment should be the same type, the median soft label is assigned to each centerline pixel in the segment. Next, artery vein pairs are matched using an iterative algorithm, and the widths of the vessels are used to calculate the AVR. We trained and tested the algorithm on a set of 65 high resolution digital color fundus photographs using a reference standard that indicates for each major vessel in the image whether it is an artery or vein. We compared the AVR values produced by our system with those determined by a semi-automated reference system. We obtained a mean unsigned error of 0.06 (SD 0.04) in 40 images with a mean AVR of 0.67. A second observer using the semi-automated system obtained the same mean unsigned error of 0.06 (SD 0.05) on the set of images with a mean AVR of 0.66. The testing data and reference standard used in this study has been made publicly available.     

Automatic identification of retinal arteries and veins from dual-wavelength images using structural and functional features

This paper presents an automated method to identify arteries and veins in dual-wavelength retinal fundus images recorded at 570 and 600 nm. Dual-wavelength imaging provides both structural and functional features that can be exploited for identification. The processing begins with automated tracing of the vessels from the 570-nm image. The 600-nm image is registered to this image, and structural and functional features are computed for each vessel segment. We use the relative strength of the vessel central reflex as the structural feature. The central reflex phenomenon, caused by light reflection from vessel surfaces that are parallel to the incident light, is especially pronounced at longer wavelengths for arteries compared to veins. We use a dual-Gaussian to model the cross-sectional intensity profile of vessels. The model parameters are estimated using a robust -estimator, and the relative strength of the central reflex is computed from these parameters. The functional feature exploits the fact that arterial blood is more oxygenated relative to that in veins. This motivates use of the ratio of the vessel optical densities (ODs) from images at oxygen-sensitive and oxygen-insensitive wavelengths () as a functional indicator. Finally, the structural and functional features are combined in a classifier to identify the type of the vessel. We experimented with four different classifiers and the best result was given by a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. With the SVM classifier, the proposed algorithm achieved true positive rates of 97% for the arteries and 90% for the veins, when applied to a set of 251 vessel segments obtained from 25 dual wavelength images. The ability to identify the vessel type is useful in applications such as automated retinal vessel oximetry and automated analysis of vascular changes without manual intervention.     

Retinal image analysis using curvelet transform and multistructure elements morphology by reconstruction

Retinal images can be used in several applications, such as ocular fundus operations as well as human recognition. Also, they play important roles in detection of some diseases in early stages, such as diabetes, which can be performed by comparison of the states of retinal blood vessels. Intrinsic characteristics of retinal images make the blood vessel detection process difficult. Here, we proposed a new algorithm to detect the retinal blood vessels effectively. Due to the high ability of the curvelet transform in representing the edges, modification of curvelet transform coefficients to enhance the retinal image edges better prepares the image for the segmentation part. The directionality feature of the multistructure elements method makes it an effective tool in edge detection. Hence, morphology operators using multistructure elements are applied to the enhanced image in order to find the retinal image ridges. Afterward, morphological operators by reconstruction eliminate the ridges not belonging to the vessel tree while trying to preserve the thin vessels unchanged. In order to increase the efficiency of the morphological operators by reconstruction, they were applied using multistructure elements. A simple thresholding method along with connected components analysis (CCA) indicates the remained ridges belonging to vessels. In order to utilize CCA more efficiently, we locally applied the CCA and length filtering instead of considering the whole image. Experimental results on a known database, DRIVE, and achieving to more than 94% accuracy in about 50 s for blood vessel detection, proved that the blood vessels can be effectively detected by applying our method on the retinal images.     

An Active Contour Model for Segmenting and Measuring Retinal Vessels

This paper presents an algorithm for segmenting and measuring retinal vessels, by growing a “Ribbon of Twins” active contour model, which uses two pairs of contours to capture each vessel edge, while maintaining width consistency. The algorithm is initialized using a generalized morphological order filter to identify approximate vessels centerlines. Once the vessel segments are identified the network topology is determined using an implicit neural cost function to resolve junction configurations. The algorithm is robust, and can accurately locate vessel edges under difficult conditions, including noisy blurred edges, closely parallel vessels, light reflex phenomena, and very fine vessels. It yields precise vessel width measurements, with subpixel average width errors. We compare the algorithm with several benchmarks from the literature, demonstrating higher segmentation sensitivity and more accurate width measurement.      

A high performance hardware architecture for portable,low-power retinal vessel segmentation

The retina of the human eye and more particularly the retinal blood vasculature can be used in several medical and biometric applications. The use of retinal images in such applications however, is computationally intensive, due to the high complexity of the algorithms used to extract the vessels from the retina. In addition, the emergence of portable biometric authentication applications, as well as onsite biomedical diagnostics raises the need for real-time, power-efficient implementations of such algorithms that can also satisfy the performance and accuracy requirements of portable systems that use retinal images. In an attempt to meet those requirements, this work presents a VLSI implementation of a retina vessel segmentation system while exploring various parameters that affect the power consumption, the accuracy and performance of the system. The proposed design implements an unsupervised vessel segmentation algorithm which utilizes matched filtering with signed integers to enhance the difference between the blood vessels and the rest of the retina. The design accelerates the process of obtaining a binary map of the vessels tree by using parallel processing and efficient resource sharing, achieving real-time performance. The design has been verified on a commercial FPGA platform and exhibits significant performance improvements (up to 90×) when compared to other existing hardware and software implementations, with an overall accuracy of 92.4%. Furthermore, the low power consumption of the proposed VLSI implementation enables the proposed architecture to be used in portable systems, as it achieves an efficient balance between performance, power consumption and accuracy.     

Detection of new vessels on the optic disc using retinal photographs

Proliferative diabetic retinopathy is a rare condition likely to lead to severe visual impairment. It is characterized by the development of abnormal new retinal vessels. We describe a method for automatically detecting new vessels on the optic disc using retinal photography. Vessel-like candidate segments are first detected using a method based on watershed lines and ridge strength measurement. Fifteen feature parameters, associated with shape, position, orientation, brightness, contrast and line density are calculated for each candidate segment. Based on these features, each segment is categorized as normal or abnormal using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The system was trained and tested by cross-validation using 38 images with new vessels and 71 normal images from two diabetic retinal screening centers and one hospital eye clinic. The discrimination performance of the fifteen features was tested against a clinical reference standard. Fourteen features were found to be effective and used in the final test. The area under the receiver operator characteristic curve was 0.911 for detecting images with new vessels on the disc. This accuracy may be sufficient for it to play a useful clinical role in an automated retinopathy analysis system.     

Retinal vessel centerline extraction using multiscale matched filters, confidence and edge measures

Motivated by the goals of improving detection of low-contrast and narrow vessels and eliminating false detections at nonvascular structures, a new technique is presented for extracting vessels in retinal images. The core of the technique is a new likelihood ratio test that combines matched-filter responses, confidence measures and vessel boundary measures. Matched filter responses are derived in scale-space to extract vessels of widely varying widths. A vessel confidence measure is defined as a projection of a vector formed from a normalized pixel neighborhood onto a normalized ideal vessel profile. Vessel boundary measures and associated confidences are computed at potential vessel boundaries. Combined, these responses form a six-dimensional measurement vector at each pixel. A training technique is used to develop a mapping of this vector to a likelihood ratio that measures the "vesselness" at each pixel. Results comparing this vesselness measure to matched filters alone and to measures based on the Hessian of intensities show substantial improvements, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The Hessian can be used in place of the matched filter to obtain similar but less-substantial improvements or to steer the matched filter by preselecting kernel orientations. Finally, the new vesselness likelihood ratio is embedded into a vessel tracing framework, resulting in an efficient and effective vessel centerline extraction algorithm.     

基于过渡区提取的视网膜血管分割方法

 针对现有视网膜血管分割方法对于小血管和低对比度血管分割效果差的问题,提出了一种基于过渡区提取的视网膜血管分割方法.该方法首先采用二维高斯匹配滤波预处理以增强血管,然后采用基于最佳熵的方法提取主血管、采用基于分布式遗传算法和Otsu相结合的方法提取过渡区,最后利用区域连通性分析所提取的主血管和过渡区,分割出最终的血管.通过在Hoover眼底图像库中的实验,结果表明该方法在小血管的提取、连通性和有效性方面均优于Hoover算法,另外由于迁移策略的分布式遗传算法的引入,使得算法效率也明显提高.     

A fast and simple algorithm for the calculation of convective heattransfer by large vessels in three-dimensional inhomogeneoustissues

A fast and simple algorithm has been presented for the calculation of time-dependent temperature distributions in inhomogeneous vascularized tissue. Three-dimensional anatomical data of tissues and vessel structures are decomposed into elementary cubic nodes by a special digitizing routine with vessels represented by connected strings of vessel nodes. Vessel cross sections may be irregular shaped and/or tapered. Conductive and convective heat transfer was calculated through use of the heat balance technique on each cubic node resulting in an explicit finite difference computational scheme. Employing a three time level scheme, the Fourier stability criterion is circumvented allowing arbitrary time steps to be defined in the algorithm. Time steps as large as 100 times the Fourier restricted one still result in stable and convergent calculations of the stationary temperature distribution. Vessels with different flows and diameters are incorporated by performing a vessel specific second discretization step in time. Using the new algorithm as a mathematical tool the thermal equilibration length of vessel segments have been established under a broad range of geometrical and flow conditions. Validation followed from comparing transient and stationary temperature distributions derived by the proposed algorithm to those from an accurate cylindrical numerical model. Predicted values for the thermal equilibration lengths are compared to an analytical expression and phantom experiments. The algorithm is incorporated in a thermal model being the main part of our hyperthermia treatment planning system.     

Retinal fundus vasculature multilevel segmentation using whale optimization algorithm

The aim was to present a novel automated approach for extracting the vasculature of retinal fundus images. The proposed vasculature extraction method on retinal fundus images consists of two phases: preprocessing phase and segmentation phase. In the first phase, brightness enhancement is applied for the retinal fundus images. For the vessel segmentation phase, a hybrid model of multilevel thresholding along with whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is performed. WOA is used to improve the segmentation accuracy through finding the \(n{-}1\) optimal n-level threshold on the fundus image. To evaluate the accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis measurements are used. The proposed approach achieved an overall accuracy of 97.8%, sensitivity of 88.9%, and specificity of 98.7% for the identification of retinal blood vessels by using a dataset that was collected from Bostan diagnostic center in Fayoum city. The area under the ROC curve reached a value of 0.967. Automated identification of retinal blood vessels based on whale algorithm seems highly successful through a comprehensive optimization process of operational parameters.     

Optic disc detection from normalized digital fundus images by means of a vessels' direction matched filter

Optic disc (OD) detection is a main step while developing automated screening systems for diabetic retinopathy. We present in this paper a method to automatically detect the position of the OD in digital retinal fundus images. The method starts by normalizing luminosity and contrast through out the image using illumination equalization and adaptive histogram equalization methods respectively. The OD detection algorithm is based on matching the expected directional pattern of the retinal blood vessels. Hence, a simple matched filter is proposed to roughly match the direction of the vessels at the OD vicinity. The retinal vessels are segmented using a simple and standard 2-D Gaussian matched filter. Consequently, a vessels direction map of the segmented retinal vessels is obtained using the same segmentation algorithm. The segmented vessels are then thinned, and filtered using local intensity, to represent finally the OD-center candidates. The difference between the proposed matched filter resized into four different sizes, and the vessels' directions at the surrounding area of each of the OD-center candidates is measured. The minimum difference provides an estimate of the OD-center coordinates. The proposed method was evaluated using a subset of the STARE project's dataset, containing 81 fundus images of both normal and diseased retinas, and initially used by literature OD detection methods. The OD-center was detected correctly in 80 out of the 81 images (98.77%). In addition, the OD-center was detected correctly in all of the 40 images (100%) using the publicly available DRIVE dataset.     

Improved detection of the central reflex in retinal vessels using a generalized dual-gaussian model and robust hypothesis testing

This updates an earlier publication by the authors describing a robust framework for detecting vasculature in noisy retinal fundus images. We improved the handling of the "central reflex" phenomenon in which a vessel has a "hollow" appearance. This is particularly pronounced in dual-wavelength images acquired at 570 and 600 nm for retinal oximetry. It is prominent in the 600 nm images that are sensitive to the blood oxygen content. Improved segmentation of these vessels is needed to improve oximetry. We show that the use of a generalized dual-Gaussian model for the vessel intensity profile instead of the Gaussian yields a significant improvement. Our method can account for variations in the strength of the central reflex, the relative contrast, width, orientation, scale, and imaging noise. It also enables the classification of regular and central reflex vessels. The proposed method yielded a sensitivity of 72% compared to 38% by the algorithm of Can et al., and 60% by the robust detection based on a single-Gaussian model. The specificity for the methods were 95%, 97%, and 98%, respectively.     

Elastic registration for retinal images based on reconstructed vascular trees

The vascular tree of the retina is likely the most representative and stable feature for eye fundus images in registration. Based on the reconstructed vascular tree, we propose an elastic matching algorithm to register pairs of fundus images. The identified vessels are thinned and approximated using short line segments of equal length that results a set of elements. The set of elements corresponding to one vascular tree are elastically deformed to optimally match the set of elements of another vascular tree, with the guide of an energy function to finally establish pixel relationship between both vascular trees. The mapped positions of pixels in the transformed retinal image are computed to be the sum of their original locations and corresponding displacement vectors. For the purpose of performance comparison, a weak affine model based fast chamfer matching technique is proposed and implemented. Experiment results validated the effectiveness of the elastic matching algorithm and its advantage over the weak affine model for registration of retinal fundus images.     

基于血管分割的视网膜图像无参考质量评价方法

为了研究不同失真类型和不同失真程度对血管分割 的影 响,本文将图像的失真类型和失真程度量化为图像血管分割精确度,由于现有公开库中包含 血管分割标签 的图像中均为低失真甚至无失真图像,因此本文构建了一个视网膜失真图像数据库,共包含 2种失真类型, 每种失真类型的图像均有8个等级的失真程度,共552幅视网膜失真图像,并将每幅失真图 像对应的血管 分割精确度作为该图像的标签。此外,本文提出了一种基于血管分割方法的视网膜图像无参 考质量评价方 法,通过提取视网膜图像的像素值统计特征、图像纹理特征以及血管形状特征得到最终视网 膜图像的质量。 在提出的数据库上测试结果显示,皮尔逊线性相关系数值高于0.96, 斯皮尔曼等级相关系数值高于0.95。 与现有评价方法相比,该方法优于传统的无参考评价方法,更能够客观的反映不同失真图像 对血管分割这一应用的影响。     

一种新的视网膜血管网络自动分割方法

提出了一种基于脉冲耦合神经网络(PCNN)和分布式遗传算法(DGA)的视网膜血管自动分割方法.首先采用二维高斯匹配滤波器预处理以增强血管,然后采用DGA快速搜索出PCNN的最佳参数设置值并运用PCNN分割出增强图像的血管网络,最后对分割得到的血管网络结合区域连通性特征,采用面积滤波算子滤除噪声,提取出最终的血管网络.通过在国际上公开的Hoover眼底图像库中的实验,结果表明,该方法在血管分支提取和算法有效性方面明显优于Hoover算法,具有较高的临床应用价值.     

Measuring tortuosity of the intracerebral vasculature from MRA images

The clinical recognition of abnormal vascular tortuosity, or excessive bending, twisting, and winding, is important to the diagnosis of many diseases. Automated detection and quantitation of abnormal vascular tortuosity from three-dimensional (3-D) medical image data would, therefore, be of value. However, previous research has centered primarily upon two-dimensional (2-D) analysis of the special subset of vessels whose paths are normally close to straight. This report provides the first 3-D tortuosity analysis of clusters of vessels within the normally tortuous intracerebral circulation. We define three different clinical patterns of abnormal tortuosity. We extend into 3-D two tortuosity metrics previously reported as useful in analyzing 2-D images and describe a new metric that incorporates counts of minima of total curvature. We extract vessels from MRA data, map corresponding anatomical regions between sets of normal patients and patients with known pathology, and evaluate the three tortuosity metrics for ability to detect each type of abnormality within the region of interest. We conclude that the new tortuosity metric appears to be the most effective in detecting several types of abnormalities. However, one of the other metrics, based on a sum of curvature magnitudes, may be more effective in recognizing tightly coiled, "corkscrew" vessels associated with malignant tumors.