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A review of retinal blood vessels extraction techniques: challenges, taxonomy, and future trends

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Abstract

The visual exploration of retinal blood vessels assists ophthalmologists in the diagnoses of different abnormalities of the eyes such as diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, cardiovascular ailment, high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis, and age-related macular degeneration. The manual inspection of retinal vasculature is an extremely challenging and tedious task for medical experts due to the complex structure of an eye, tiny blood vessels, and variation in vessels width. Several automatic retinal vessels extraction techniques have been proposed in contemporary literature, which assist ophthalmologists in the timely identification of an eye disorders. However, due to the fast evolution of such techniques, a comprehensive survey is needed. This survey presents a comprehensive review of such techniques, strategies, and algorithms presented to date. The techniques are classified into logical groups based on the underlying methodology employed for retinal vessel extraction. The performance of existing techniques is reported on the publicly accessible datasets in term of various performance measures, providing a valuable comparison among the techniques. Thus, this survey presents a valuable resource for researchers working toward automatic extraction of retinal vessels.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Telecommunication Engineering, University College of Engineering and Technology (UCET), The Islamia University, Bahawalpur, Pakistan

    Khan Bahadar Khan

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Khan Bahadar Khan, Amir A. Khaliq & Abdul Jalil

  3. Department of Computer Science, Comsats Institute of Information Technology, Lahore, Pakistan

    Muhammad Aksam Iftikhar

  4. Department of Computer Science, CECOS University, Peshawar, KPK, Pakistan

    Khan Bahadar Khan, Najeeb Ullah, Muhammad Waqar Aziz & Kifayat Ullah

  5. PAVIS - Pattern Analysis and Computer Vision Lab, The Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia - IIT, Genoa, Italy

    Muhammad Shahid

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Khan, K.B., Khaliq, A.A., Jalil, A. et al. A review of retinal blood vessels extraction techniques: challenges, taxonomy, and future trends. Pattern Anal Applic 22, 767–802 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-018-0754-8

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