Retinal image registration using topological vascular tree segmentation and bifurcation structures
Retinal image registration using topological vascular tree segmentation and bifurcation structures
复制标题
使用拓扑血管树分割和分叉结构的视网膜图像配准
DOI：
10.1016/j.bspc.2014.10.009
复制
发表时间：
2015-02-01
影响因子：
5.1
通讯作者：
Tian, Jing
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Chen, Li;Huang, Xiaotong;Tian, Jing
本文提出了一种新的视网膜图像分割和配准方法。本文的贡献是双重的。首先，传统的血管跟踪方法使用局部顺序搜索，这很容易被局部强度不连续或血管破裂所捕获。该方法使用全局图决策，可以从视网膜图像中分割出宽度为1个像素、完全连通的拓扑血管树。从最初的多尺度脊分割开始，不连续的血管被回顾性地连接，然后在特定定义的图上使用最短路径算法去除假脊。假设检验是根据像素属于前景和背景的概率来定义的，这使得错误检测可以被去除。其次，传统的点匹配方法很大程度上依赖于单个分叉点的分叉角。由于相似的角度值，两个图像之间的特征对应可能不是唯一的。有鉴于此，结构匹配配准受到青睐。分叉结构由一个主分叉点及其三个相连的相邻像素或血管段组成。每个分叉结构的特征向量由归一化的分支角度和长度组成，这对于平移、旋转、缩放甚至适度的失真都是相当鲁棒的。实验结果证明了该方法的上级性能。(C)2014爱思唯尔有限公司版权所有。
This paper presents a new retinal image segmentation and registration approaches. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, the conventional vessel-tracking methods use local sequential searching, which can be easily trapped by local intensity discontinuity or vessel rupture. The proposed method uses global graph-based decision that can segment the topological vascular tree with 1-pixel width and fully connection from retinal images. Staring from initial multi-scale ridge segmentation, the disconnected vessels are retrospectively connected and then spurious ridges are removed using a shortest path algorithm on a specially defined graph. The hypothesis testing is defined in terms of probability of pixel belong to foreground and background, which enables that the false detections could be removed. Second, the conventional point-matching methods largely depend on the branching angles of single bifurcation point. The feature correspondence across two images may not be unique due to the similar angle values. In view of this, structure-matching registration is favored. The bifurcation structure is composed of a master bifurcation point and its three connected neighboring pixels or vessel segments. The characteristic vector of each bifurcation structure consists of the normalized branching angle and length, which is fairly robust to be against translation, rotation, scaling, and even modest distortion. The experimental results are presented to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.