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Retinal images can be used in several applications, such as ocular fundus operations as well as human recognition. Also, they play important roles in detection of some diseases in early stages, such as diabetes, which can be performed by comparison of the states of retinal blood vessels. Intrinsic characteristics of retinal images make the blood vessel detection process difficult. Here, we proposed a new algorithm to detect the retinal blood vessels effectively. Due to the high ability of the curvelet transform in representing the edges, modification of curvelet transform coefficients to enhance the retinal image edges better prepares the image for the segmentation part. The directionality feature of the multistructure elements method makes it an effective tool in edge detection. Hence, morphology operators using multistructure elements are applied to the enhanced image in order to find the retinal image ridges. Afterward, morphological operators by reconstruction eliminate the ridges not belonging to the vessel tree while trying to preserve the thin vessels unchanged. In order to increase the efficiency of the morphological operators by reconstruction, they were applied using multistructure elements. A simple thresholding method along with connected components analysis (CCA) indicates the remained ridges belonging to vessels. In order to utilize CCA more efficiently, we locally applied the CCA and length filtering instead of considering the whole image. Experimental results on a known database, DRIVE, and achieving to more than 94% accuracy in about 50 s for blood vessel detection, proved that the blood vessels can be effectively detected by applying our method on the retinal images. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]