Title
An Active Contour Model for Segmenting and Measuring Retinal Vessels
Abstract
This paper presents an algorithm for segmenting and measuring retinal vessels, by growing a ldquoRibbon of Twinsrdquo 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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1109/TMI.2009.2017941
Medical Imaging, IEEE Transactions
Keywords
Field
DocType
blood vessels,eye,image segmentation,medical image processing,neural nets,Ribbon of Twins active contour model,generalized morphological order filter,implicit neural cost function,junction configurations,network topology,retinal vessel measurement,retinal vessel segmentation,vessel centerline approximation,Parametric active contour,retinal vessel segmentation
Active contour model,Computer vision,Segmentation,Image segmentation,Network topology,Robustness (computer science),Artificial intelligence,Subpixel rendering,Artificial neural network,Mathematics,Observational error
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
28
9
0278-0062
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
130
4.01
14
Authors
3
Search Limit
100130
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bashir Al-Diri11304.01
Andrew Hunter217511.31
David Steel31304.01