The optic nerve head (optic disc) plays an important role in the diagnosis of retinal diseases. Automatic localization and segmentation of the optic disc is critical towards a good computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system. In this paper, we propose a method that combines edge detection, the Circular Hough Transform and a statistical deformable model to detect the optic disc from retinal fundus images. The algorithm was evaluated against a data set of 325 digital color fundus images, which includes both normal images and images with various pathologies. The result shows that the average error in area overlap is 11.3% and the average absolute area error is 10.8%, which outperforms existing methods. The result indicates a high correlation with ground truth segmentation and thus demonstrates a good potential for this system to be integrated with other retinal CAD systems.