Journal
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MEDICAL IMAGING
Volume 39, Issue 2, Pages 341-356Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/TMI.2019.2926492
Keywords
Retinal images; dominant set clustering; blood vessel; vascular topology; Artery; vein classification
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation Program of China [61601029]
- Chinese Postdoctoral Science Foundation [2019M652156]
- Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation [LZ19F010001]
- Ningbo Natural Science Foundation [2018A610055]
- Grant of Ningbo 3315 Innovation Team
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The estimation of vascular network topology in complex networks is important in understanding the relationship between vascular changes and a wide spectrum of diseases. Automatic classification of the retinal vascular trees into arteries and veins is of direct assistance to the ophthalmologist in terms of diagnosis and treatment of eye disease. However, it is challenging due to their projective ambiguity and subtle changes in appearance, contrast, and geometry in the imaging process. In this paper, we propose a novel method that is capable of making the artery/vein (A/V) distinction in retinal color fundus images based on vascular network topological properties. To this end, we adapt the concept of and formalize the retinal blood vessel topology estimation and the A/V classification as a pairwise clustering problem. The graph is constructed through image segmentation, skeletonization, and identification of significant nodes. The edge weight is defined as the inverse Euclidean distance between its two end points in the feature space of intensity, orientation, curvature, diameter, and entropy. The reconstructed vascular network is classified into arteries and veins based on their intensity and morphology. The proposed approach has been applied to five public databases, namely INSPIRE, IOSTAR, VICAVR, DRIVE, and WIDE, and achieved high accuracies of 95.1%, 94.2%, 93.8%, 91.1%, and 91.0%, respectively. Furthermore, we have made manual annotations of the blood vessel topologies for INSPIRE, IOSTAR, VICAVR, and DRIVE datasets, and these annotations are released for public access so as to facilitate researchers in the community.
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