Blood vessel detection in retinal images and its application in diabetic retinopathy screening

In this dissertation, I investigated computing algorithms for automated retinal blood vessel detection. Changes in blood vessel structures are important indicators of many diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, etc. Blood vessel is also very useful in tracking of disease progression, and for biometric authentication. In this dissertation, I proposed two algorithms to detect blood vessel maps in retina. The first algorithm is based on integration of a Gaussian tracing scheme and a Gabor-variance filter. This algorithm traces the large blood vessel in retinal images enhanced with adaptive histogram equalization. Small vessels are traced on further enhanced images by a Gabor-variance filter. The second algorithm is called a radial contrast transform (RCT) algorithm, which converts the intensity information in spatial domain to a high dimensional radial contrast domain. Different feature descriptors are designed to improve the speed, sensitivity, and expandability of the vessel detection system. Performances comparison of the two algorithms with those in the literature shows favorable and robust results. Furthermore, a new performance measure based on central line of blood vessels is proposed as an alternative to more reliable assessment of detection schemes for small vessels, because the significant variations at the edges of small vessels need not be considered. The proposed algorithms were successfully tested in the field for early diabetic retinopathy (DR) screening. A highly modular code library to take advantage of the parallel processing power of multi-core computer architecture was tested in a clinical trial. Performance results showed that our scheme can achieve similar or even better performance than human expert readers for detection of micro-aneurysms on difficult images.