Unsupervised Retinal Vessel Segmentation Using Combined Filters

PLoS One. 2016 Feb 26;11(2):e0149943. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0149943. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Image segmentation of retinal blood vessels is a process that can help to predict and diagnose cardiovascular related diseases, such as hypertension and diabetes, which are known to affect the retinal blood vessels' appearance. This work proposes an unsupervised method for the segmentation of retinal vessels images using a combined matched filter, Frangi's filter and Gabor Wavelet filter to enhance the images. The combination of these three filters in order to improve the segmentation is the main motivation of this work. We investigate two approaches to perform the filter combination: weighted mean and median ranking. Segmentation methods are tested after the vessel enhancement. Enhanced images with median ranking are segmented using a simple threshold criterion. Two segmentation procedures are applied when considering enhanced retinal images using the weighted mean approach. The first method is based on deformable models and the second uses fuzzy C-means for the image segmentation. The procedure is evaluated using two public image databases, Drive and Stare. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods perform well for vessel segmentation in comparison with state-of-the-art methods.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Cardiovascular Diseases / diagnosis*
  • Cardiovascular Diseases / pathology
  • Humans
  • Image Enhancement / methods*
  • Retinal Vessels / pathology*

Grants and funding

The sources of funding that have supported this work are: Fundação de Amparo à Ciência e Tecnologia do Estado de Pernambuco (http://www.facepe.br/), grant number IBPG-0152-1.03/12, author WSO; Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (http://www.cnpq.br/), authors TIR, GDCC, JVT; Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (http://www.capes.gov.br/), authors TIR, GDCC; and Flemish Government Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology, Belgium through the SBO TOMFOOD project (http://www.iwt.be/), author JS. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.