title: Interactive retinal vessel extraction by integrating vessel tracing and graph search.
abstract: Despite recent advances, automatic blood vessel extraction from low quality retina images remains difficult. We propose an interactive approach that enables a user to efficiently obtain near perfect vessel segmentation with a few mouse clicks. Given two seed points, the approach seeks an optimal path between them by minimizing a cost function. In contrast to the Live-Vessel approach, the graph in our approach is based on the curve fragments generated with vessel tracing instead of individual pixels. This enables our approach to overcome the shortcut problem in extracting tortuous vessels and the problem of vessel interference in extracting neighboring vessels in minimal-cost path techniques, resulting in less user interaction for extracting thin and tortuous vessels from low contrast images. It also makes the approach much faster.
authors.affiliation: SRI International, Princeton, NJ, USA.
authors.forename: Lu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: SRI International, Princeton, NJ, USA.
authors.forename: Vinutha
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Kallem
authors.affiliation: SRI International, Princeton, NJ, USA.
authors.forename: Mayank
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bansal
authors.affiliation: SRI International, Princeton, NJ, USA.
authors.forename: Jayan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Eledath
authors.affiliation: SRI International, Princeton, NJ, USA.
authors.forename: Harpreet
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Sawhney
authors.affiliation: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Karen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Karp
authors.affiliation: Scheie Eye Institute, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Denise J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Pearson
authors.affiliation: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Monte D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Mills
authors.affiliation: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Graham E
authors.initials: GE
authors.lastname: Quinn
authors.affiliation: Scheie Eye Institute, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Richard A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Stone
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D005451:Fluorescein Angiography / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012164:Retinal Diseases / Q000473:pathology*; D012171:Retinal Vessels / Q000473:pathology*; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D018511:Systems Integration; D014584:User-Computer Interface