Paper Info
Title
Identification and reconnection of interrupted vessels in retinal vessel segmentation.
Abstract
The morphology of retinal blood vessels contains valuable information for the diagnosis of retinal dysfunctions. The vessels can be segmented from color fundus images but the connectivity of the segmented vessels is not always preserved because of low contrast, imaging noise and artifacts. If a continuous vessel is interpreted as multiple disjoint vessel segments, the morphological measurements such as tortuosity may not be representative of true properties of retinal vessels. We describe an algorithm to identify the vessel segment interruptions based on connected component analysis and then reconnect them using a graph based approach. The proposed method was evaluated on a dataset of 25 vessel segmentation images resulting into a reconnection performance measure of 81.63% compared to the gold standard obtained by the manual reconnection process. Our approach has allowed the complete vessel tree to be connected, and has potential in providing improved morphological measurements.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1109/ISBI.2011.5872665
ISBI
Keywords
Field
DocType
blood vessels,eye,image segmentation,medical disorders,medical image processing,tree searching,trees (mathematics),color fundus images,connected component analysis,depth first search method,graph based method,imaging artifacts,imaging noise,morphological measurements,patient diagnosis,retinal dysfunctions,retinal vessel segmentation algorithm,tortuosity,vessel tree method,connection,fundus,interruption,retina,vessel
Computer vision,Pattern recognition,Retina,Tortuosity,Medical imaging,Computer science,Fundus (eye),Image segmentation,Pixel,Artificial intelligence,Retinal,Connected-component labeling
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1945-7928
4
0.40
References 
Authors
7
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Vinayak S. Joshi1163.96
Mona K Garvin227217.51
J. M. Reinhardt378271.98
Michael D Abràmoff41734104.74