An active contour model for the automatic detection of the fovea in fluorescein angiographies

Fovea segmentation in fluorescein angiographies is a fundamental first task in any study of ocular diseases. The importance of fovea detection is due to the fact that the nearer the centre of the fovea a lesion is, the graver this lesion is. The proposed method is based on B-snakes and uses a greedy algorithm to minimise an appropriate energy which accurately leads to a convenient characterisation of the boundary of the foveal zone. The first initialisation step, which consists of finding the most appropriate local minimum along with a procedure to construct an initial contour involving a region growing algorithm, leads to a convenient and robust initialisation of the proposed active contour model.