Sector-based optic cup segmentation with intensity and blood vessel priors.

The optic cup segmentation is critical for automated cup-to-disk ratio measurement, and hence computer-aided diagnosis of glaucoma. In this paper, we propose a novel sector-based method for optic cup segmentation. The method comprises two parts: intensity-based cup segmentation with shape constraints and blood vessel-based refinement. The initial estimation of the cup is obtained by applying a statistical deformable model on the vessel free image. At the same time, blood vessels within the optic disk are extracted, after which vessel bendings and vessel boundaries in the nasal side are located. Subsequently, these key points in the blood vessels are used to fine tune the cup. The algorithm is evaluated on 650 fundus images from the ORIGA(-light) database. Experimental results show that the Dice coefficient for the optic cup segmentation can be as high as 0.83, which outperforms other existing methods. The results demonstrate good potential for the proposed method to be used in automated optic cup segmentation and glaucoma diagnosis.