Blood vessel extraction using morphological operation for diabetic retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy is an eye problem that faced by the diabetic´s patient. Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is caused by the changes of the blood vessel in the retina. In first stage in DR, the blood vessels leak fluid and expandable. However, in the advance stage of DR a new blood vessel that fragile and abnormal may formed and leaks blood to the retina. This can caused vision loss or even blindness. Therefore, this paper proposes to extract the blood vessel based on peak and valley detection. The proposed methods utilized a green channel image and the inversion image. In this work, 20 images are utilized namely from Digital Retina Images for Vessel Extraction (DRIVE). The resulting images are compared with the benchmark images in term of sensitivity and specificity. The average sensitivity and specificity for the proposed method is 99.6% and 47.9% respectively.