Fast, accurate and robust retinal vessel segmentation system

The accurate segmentation of the retinal vessel tree has become the prerequisite step for automatic ophthalmological and cardiovascular diagnosis systems. Aside from accuracy, robustness and processing speed are also considered crucial for medical purposes. In order to meet those requirements, this work presents a novel approach to extract blood vessels from the retinal fundus, by using morphology-based global thresholding to draw the retinal venule structure and centerline detection method for capillaries. The proposed system is tested on DRIVE and STARE databases and has an average accuracy of 95.88% for singledatabase test and 95.27% for the cross-database test. Meanwhile, the system is designed to minimize the computing complexity and processes multiple independent procedures in parallel, thus having an execution time of 1.677 s per image on CPU platform. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Nalecz Institute of Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering of the Polish Academy of Sciences.