Paper
2 March 2007 Blood vessel classification into arteries and veins in retinal images
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
The prevalence of diabetes is expected to increase dramatically in coming years; already today it accounts for a major proportion of the health care budget in many countries. Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), a micro vascular complication very often seen in diabetes patients, is the most common cause of visual loss in working age population of developed countries today. Since the possibility of slowing or even stopping the progress of this disease depends on the early detection of DR, an automatic analysis of fundus images would be of great help to the ophthalmologist due to the small size of the symptoms and the large number of patients. An important symptom for DR are abnormally wide veins leading to an unusually low ratio of the average diameter of arteries to veins (AVR). There are also other diseases like high blood pressure or diseases of the pancreas with one symptom being an abnormal AVR value. To determine it, a classification of vessels as arteries or veins is indispensable. As to our knowledge despite the importance there have only been two approaches to vessel classification yet. Therefore we propose an improved method. We compare two feature extraction methods and two classification methods based on support vector machines and neural networks. Given a hand-segmentation of vessels our approach achieves 95.32% correctly classified vessel pixels. This value decreases by 10% on average, if the result of a segmentation algorithm is used as basis for the classification.
© (2007) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Claudia Kondermann, Daniel Kondermann, and Michelle Yan "Blood vessel classification into arteries and veins in retinal images", Proc. SPIE 6512, Medical Imaging 2007: Image Processing, 651247 (2 March 2007); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.708469
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CITATIONS
Cited by 74 scholarly publications and 2 patents.
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KEYWORDS
Arteries

Veins

Image classification

Image segmentation

Neural networks

Principal component analysis

Optical discs

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