Separation of the retinal vascular graph in arteries and veins based upon structural knowledge

The vascular structure of the retina consists of two kinds of vessels: arteries and veins. Together these vessels form the vascular graph. In this paper, we present an approach to separate arteries and veins based on a pre-segmentation and a few hand-labelled vessel segments. We use a rule-based method to propagate the vessel labels through the vascular graph. The anatomical characteristics of the vessels on the retina are modelled as a dual constraint graph. We embed this task as double-layered constrained search problem steered by a heuristical AC-3 algorithm to overcome the NP-hard computational complexity. Results are presented on vascular graphs generated from manual as well as on automatical segmentation. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.