Evaluation of blood vessel detection methods

We address the problem of evaluating the performance of algorithms for detecting curvilinear structures in medical images. As an exemplar we consider the detection of vessel trees which contain structures of variable width and contrast. Results for the conventional approach to evaluation, in which the detector output is compared directly with a groundtruth mask, tend to be dominated by the detection of large vessels and fail to capture adequately whether or not finer, lower contrast vessels have been detected successfully. We propose and investigate three alternative evaluation strategies. We demonstrate the use of the standard and new evaluation strategies to assess the performance of a novel method for detecting vessels in retinograms, using the publicly available DRIVE database. © 2011 Copyright Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).