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In the last years, image processing has been an important tool for health care. The analysis of retinal vessel images has become crucial to achieving a better diagnosis and treatment for several cardiovascular and ophthalmological deceases. Therefore, an automatic and accurate procedure for retinal vessel and optic disc segmentation is essential for illness detection. This task is extremely hard and time-consuming, often requiring the assistance of human experts with a high degree of professional skills. Several retinal vessel segmentation methods have been developed with satisfactory results. Nevertheless, most of such techniques present a poor performance mainly due to the complex structure of vessels in retinal images. In this paper, an accurate methodology for retinal vessel and optic disc segmentation is presented. The proposed scheme combines two different techniques: the Lateral Inhibition (LI) and the Differential Evolution (DE). The LI scheme produces a new image with enhanced contrast between the background and retinal vessels. Then, the DE algorithm is used to obtain the appropriate threshold values through the minimization of the cross-entropy function from the enhanced image. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, several experiments over images extracted from STARE, DRIVE, and DRISHTI-GS databases have been conducted. Simulation results demonstrate a high performance of the proposed scheme in comparison with similar methods reported in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]