An efficient optic cup segmentation method decreasing the influences of blood vessels

Abstract Background Optic cup is an important structure in ophthalmologic diagnosis such as glaucoma. Automatic optic cup segmentation is also a key issue in computer aided diagnosis based on digital fundus image. However, current methods didn’t effectively solve the problem of edge blurring caused by blood vessels around the optic cup. Methods In this study, an improved Bertalmio–Sapiro–Caselles–Ballester (BSCB) model was proposed to eliminate the noising induced by blood vessel. First, morphological operations were performed to get the enhanced green channel image. Then blood vessels were extracted and filled by improved BSCB model. Finally, Local Chart-Vest model was used to segment the optic cup. A total of 94 samples which included 32 glaucoma fundus images and 62 normal fundus images were experimented. Results The evaluation parameters of F-score and the boundary distance achieved by the proposed method against the results from experts were 0.7955 ± 0.0724 and 11.42 ± 3.61, respectively. Average vertical optic cup-to-disc ratio values of the normal and glaucoma samples achieved by the proposed method were 0.4369 ± 0.1193 and 0.7156 ± 0.0698, which were also close to those by experts. In addition, 39 glaucoma images from the public dataset RIM-ONE were also used for methodology evaluation. Conclusions The results showed that our proposed method could overcome the influence of blood vessels in some degree and was competitive to other current optic cup segmentation algorithms. This novel methodology will be expected to use in clinic in the field of glaucoma early detection.