Contour Line Extraction of Vein with Use of Special Tracking Strategy and Fuzzy Inference for Arteriosclerosis Diagnosis of Retinal Blood Vessel

By examining the state of the retinal blood vessels, medical doctors can diagnose the degree of arteriosclerosis of retinal blood vessels. However, its diagnosis is highly dependent on the experience of medical doctors. We had previously proposed a method that could evaluate quantitatively the degree of arteriosclerosis of the retinal blood vessels. In that method, the contour lines of vein were firstly extracted using energy function, and then the caliber of vein was calculated. However, this conventional method sometimes extracted the unexpected contour lines of blood vessels, and the points to calculate the caliber of vein for evaluation of the degree of arteriosclerosis had to be given manually. In this study, we propose an automatic method for evaluation of arteriosclerosis without any manual operations. In the experiments, the proposed method has been successfully applied to 400 actual eye fundus images, and the experimental results have shown that the proposed method is promising.