Ridge and valley enhancing filters are widely used in applications such as vessel detection in medical image computing. When images are degraded by noise or include vessels at different scales, such filters are an essential step for meaningful and stable vessel localization. In this work, we propose a novel multi-scale anisotropic fourth-order diffusion equation that allows us to smooth along vessels, while sharpening them in the orthogonal direction. The proposed filter uses a fourth-order diffusion tensor whose eigentensors and eigenvalues are determined from the local Hessian matrix, at a scale that is automatically selected for each pixel. We discuss efficient implementation using a fast explicit diffusion scheme and demonstrate results on synthetic images and vessels in fundus images. Compared to previous isotropic and anisotropic fourth-order filters, as well as established second-order vessel enhancing filters, our newly proposed one better restores the centerlines in all cases.
Despite the long history of research in this area, improved filtering and detection of ridges continues to be an active topic in medical image analysis. Our work on improving localization through fourth-order diffusion complements recent advances. For example, the SCIRD ridge detector by @cite_10 , or the vesselness measure by @cite_9 that gives better responses for vessels of varying contrasts, could replace the vessel segmentation by @cite_6 that we use as a prefiltering step. Several recent works @cite_24 @cite_29 @cite_13 @cite_15 have addressed diffusion in crossings and bifurcations, and could be combined with our work to improve the performance of our filter in such cases.
@cite_13 @cite_9 @cite_29 @cite_6 @cite_24 @cite_15 @cite_10
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The segmentation of blood vessels is a common problem in medical imaging and various applications are found in diagnostics, surgical planning, training and more. Among many different techniques, the use of multiple scales and line detectors is a popular approach. However, the typical line filters used are sensitive to intensity variations and do not target the detection of vessel walls explicitly. In this article, we combine both line and edge detection using quadrature filters across multiple scales. The filter result gives well defined vessels as linear structures, while distinct edges facilitate a robust segmentation. We apply the filter output to energy optimization techniques for segmentation and show promising results in 2D and 3D to illustrate the behavior of our method. The conference version of this article received the best paper award in the bioinformatics and biomedical applications track at ICPR 2008. A method is presented for automated segmentation of vessels in two-dimensional color images of the retina. This method can be used in computer analyses of retinal images, e.g., in automated screening for diabetic retinopathy. The system is based on extraction of image ridges, which coincide approximately with vessel centerlines. The ridges are used to compose primitives in the form of line elements. With the line elements an image is partitioned into patches by assigning each image pixel to the closest line element. Every line element constitutes a local coordinate frame for its corresponding patch. For every pixel, feature vectors are computed that make use of properties of the patches and the line elements. The feature vectors are classified using a kNN-classifier and sequential forward feature selection. The algorithm was tested on a database consisting of 40 manually labeled images. The method achieves an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.952. The method is compared with two recently published rule-based methods of and . The results show that our method is significantly better than the two rule-based methods (p<0.01). The accuracy of our method is 0.944 versus 0.947 for a second observer. The automatic extraction of blood vessels in non-fluorescein eye fundus images is a tough task in applications such as diabetic retinopathy screening. However, vessel shapes have complex variations, and accurate modeling of retinal vascular structures is challenging. We have therefore developed a new approach to accurately extract blood vessels in non-fluorescein fundus images using an orientation-aware detector (OAD). The detector was designed according to the intrinsic property of vessels being locally oriented and having linearly elongated structures. We employ the OAD to extract vessel shapes with no assumptions on parametric orientations of vessel shapes. The orientations of vessels can be efficiently modeled by the energy distribution of Fourier transformation. Accordingly, both wide and thin vessels can be extracted with two-scale segmentation in which line operators are applied in large scale and the Gabor filter bank is applied in small scale. A post-processing technique, based on the path opening operation, is applied to eliminate false responses to nonvascular areas, such as retinal structures (optic disc and macula) and pathologies (exudates, hemorrhages,and microaneurysms). This makes the detector robust and structure-aware. By achieving a competitive CAL measurement of 80.82 for the DRIVE database and 68.94 for the STARE, the experimental results demonstrated that the OAD approach outperforms existing segmentation methods. Furthermore, the proposed approach effectively works with non-fluorescein fundus images and proves highly accurate and robust in complicated regions such as the central reflex, close vessels, and crossover points, despite a high level of illumination noise in the original data. Accurate vessel detection in retinal images is an important and difficult task. Detection is made more challenging in pathological images with the presence of exudates and other abnormalities. In this paper, we present a new unsupervised vessel segmentation approach to address this problem. A novel inpainting filter, called neighborhood estimator before filling, is proposed to inpaint exudates in a way that nearby false positives are significantly reduced during vessel enhancement. Retinal vascular enhancement is achieved with a multiple-scale Hessian approach. Experimental results show that the proposed vessel segmentation method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms reported in the recent literature, both visually and in terms of quantitative measurements, with overall mean accuracy of 95.62 on the STARE dataset and 95.81 on the HRF dataset.