Automatic Method for Blood Vessel Diameter Measurement on Color Retinal Images

Abstract

Automatic detection of retinal blood vessels and measurement of blood vessel diameter has become very useful in medical applications, including the diagnosis and monitoring of vascular therapy. This paper present a new method for the detection of retinal blood vessels from fundus images. In addition, it accurately determines the blood vessels diameter. The proposed system consists of several stages starting from the detection of a complete blood vessel network (retinal images), a segmentation process, an extraction of blood vessel centerlines, and a new approach for the measurement of the blood vessel diameters utilizing the circle diameter approach. The application of the proposed method is based on three publicly available databases (DRIVE, STARE, CHASE_DB and HRF), which has been conducted and compared to recently reported measurement techniques. Numerical results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method achieving a success rate of 100% with 2.2454×10−4 as mean and 4.5833×10−5 as standard deviation differences. This could be harnessed in the future blood vessel measurement techniques.