Optic cup segmentation from fundus images for glaucoma diagnosis.

Glaucoma is a serious disease that can cause complete, permanent blindness, and its early diagnosis is very difficult. In recent years, computer-aided screening and diagnosis of glaucoma has made considerable progress. The optic cup segmentation from fundus images is an extremely important part for the computer-aided screening and diagnosis of glaucoma. This paper presented an automatic optic cup segmentation method that used both color difference information and vessel bends information from fundus images to determine the optic cup boundary. During the implementation of this algorithm, not only were the locations of the 2 types of information points used, but also the confidences of the information points were evaluated. In this way, the information points with higher confidence levels contributed more to the determination of the final cup boundary. The proposed method was evaluated using a public database for fundus images. The experimental results demonstrated that the cup boundaries obtained by the proposed method were more consistent than existing methods with the results obtained by ophthalmologists.