Automated Fovea Detection Based on Unsupervised Retinal Vessel Segmentation Method

The Computer Assisted Diagnosis systems could save workloads and give objective diagnostic to ophthalmologists. At first level of automated screening of systems feature extraction is the fundamental step. One of these retinal features is the fovea. The fovea is a small fossa on the fundus, which is represented by a deep-red or red-brown color in color retinal images. By observing retinal images, it appears that the main vessels diverge from the optic nerve head and follow a specific course that can be geometrically modeled as a parabola, with a common vertex inside the optic nerve head and the fovea located along the apex of this parabola curve. Therefore, based on this assumption, the main retinal blood vessels are segmented and fitted to a parabolic model. With respect to the core vascular structure, we can thus detect fovea in the fundus images. For the vessel segmentation, our algorithm addresses the image locally where homogeneity of features is more likely to occur. The algorithm is composed of 4 steps: multi-overlapping windows, local Radon transform, vessel validation, and parabolic fitting. In order to extract blood vessels, sub-vessels should be extracted in local windows. The high contrast between blood vessels and image background in the images cause the vessels to be associated with peaks in the Radon space. The largest vessels, using a high threshold of the Radon transform, determines the main course or overall configuration of the blood vessels which when fitted to a parabola, leads to the future localization of the fovea. In effect, with an accurate fit, the fovea normally lies along the slope joining the vertex and the focus. The darkest region along this line is the indicative of the fovea. To evaluate our method, we used 220 fundus images from a rural database (MUMS-DB) and one public one (DRIVE). The results show that, among 20 images of the first public database (DRIVE) we detected fovea in 85% of them. Also for the MUMS-DB database among 200 images we detect fovea correctly in 83% on them

Deep Learning in Cardiology

The medical field is creating large amount of data that physicians are unable to decipher and use efficiently. Moreover, rule-based expert systems are inefficient in solving complicated medical tasks or for creating insights using big data. Deep learning has emerged as a more accurate and effective technology in a wide range of medical problems such as diagnosis, prediction and intervention. Deep learning is a representation learning method that consists of layers that transform the data non-linearly, thus, revealing hierarchical relationships and structures. In this review we survey deep learning application papers that use structured data, signal and imaging modalities from cardiology. We discuss the advantages and limitations of applying deep learning in cardiology that also apply in medicine in general, while proposing certain directions as the most viable for clinical use.Comment: 27 pages, 2 figures, 10 table

Joint segmentation and classification of retinal arteries/veins from fundus images

Objective Automatic artery/vein (A/V) segmentation from fundus images is required to track blood vessel changes occurring with many pathologies including retinopathy and cardiovascular pathologies. One of the clinical measures that quantifies vessel changes is the arterio-venous ratio (AVR) which represents the ratio between artery and vein diameters. This measure significantly depends on the accuracy of vessel segmentation and classification into arteries and veins. This paper proposes a fast, novel method for semantic A/V segmentation combining deep learning and graph propagation. Methods A convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to jointly segment and classify vessels into arteries and veins. The initial CNN labeling is propagated through a graph representation of the retinal vasculature, whose nodes are defined as the vessel branches and edges are weighted by the cost of linking pairs of branches. To efficiently propagate the labels, the graph is simplified into its minimum spanning tree. Results The method achieves an accuracy of 94.8% for vessels segmentation. The A/V classification achieves a specificity of 92.9% with a sensitivity of 93.7% on the CT-DRIVE database compared to the state-of-the-art-specificity and sensitivity, both of 91.7%. Conclusion The results show that our method outperforms the leading previous works on a public dataset for A/V classification and is by far the fastest. Significance The proposed global AVR calculated on the whole fundus image using our automatic A/V segmentation method can better track vessel changes associated to diabetic retinopathy than the standard local AVR calculated only around the optic disc.Comment: Preprint accepted in Artificial Intelligence in Medicin

A new method of vascular point detection using artificial neural network

Vascular intersection is an important feature in retina fundus image (RFI). It can be used to monitor the progress of diabetes hence accurately determining vascular point is of utmost important. In this work a new method of vascular point detection using artificial neural network model has been proposed. The method uses a 5x5 window in order to detect the combination of bifurcation and crossover points in a retina fundus image. Simulated images have been used to train the artificial neural network and on convergence the network is used to test (RFI) from DRIVE database. Performance analysis of the system shows that ANN based technique achieves 100% accuracy on simulated images and minimum of 92% accuracy on RFI obtained from DRIVE database

A new method of vascular point detection using artificial neural network

Vascular intersection is an important feature in retina fundus image (RFI). It can be used to monitor the progress of diabetes hence accurately determining vascular point is of utmost important. In this work a new method of vascular point detection using artificial neural network model has been proposed. The method uses a 5×5 window in order to detect the combination of bifurcation and crossover points in a retina fundus image. Simulated images have been used to train the artificial neural network and on convergence the network is used to test (RFI) from DRIVE database. Performance analysis of the system shows that ANN based technique achieves 100% accuracy on simulated images and minimum of 92% accuracy on RFI obtained from DRIVE database

UNRAVELLING DIABETIC RETINOPATHY THROUGH IMAGE PROCESSING, NEURAL NETWORKS AND FUZZY LOGIC – A REVIEW

One of the main causes of blindness is diabetic retinopathy (DR) and it may affect people of any ages. In these days, both young and old ages are affected by diabetes, and the di abetes is the main cause of DR. Hence, it is necessary to have an automated system with good accuracy and less computation time to diagnose and treat DR, and the automated system can simplify the work of ophthalmologists. The objective is to present an overview of various works recently in detecting and segmenting the various lesions of DR. Papers were categorized based on the diagnosing tools and the methods used for detecting early and advanced stage lesions. The early lesions of DR are microaneurysms, hemorrhages, exudates, and cotton wool spots and in the advanced stage, new and fragile blood vessels can be grown. Results have been evaluated in terms of sensitivity, specificity, accuracy and receiver operating characteristic curve. This paper analyzed the various steps and different algorithms used recently for the detection and classification of DR lesions. A comparison of performances has been made in terms of sensitivity, specificity, area under the curve, and accuracy. Suggestions, future workand the area to be improved were also discussed.Keywords: Diabetic retinopathy, Image processing, Morphological operations, Neural network, Fuzzy logic.Â

Automated retinal analysis

Diabetes is a chronic disease affecting over 2% of the population in the UK [1]. Long-term complications of diabetes can affect many different systems of the body including the retina of the eye. In the retina, diabetes can lead to a disease called diabetic retinopathy, one of the leading causes of blindness in the working population of industrialised countries. The risk of visual loss from diabetic retinopathy can be reduced if treatment is given at the onset of sight-threatening retinopathy. To detect early indicators of the disease, the UK National Screening Committee have recommended that diabetic patients should receive annual screening by digital colour fundal photography [2]. Manually grading retinal images is a subjective and costly process requiring highly skilled staff. This thesis describes an automated diagnostic system based oil image processing and neural network techniques, which analyses digital fundus images so that early signs of sight threatening retinopathy can be identified. Within retinal analysis this research has concentrated on the development of four algorithms: optic nerve head segmentation, lesion segmentation, image quality assessment and vessel width measurements. This research amalgamated these four algorithms with two existing techniques to form an integrated diagnostic system. The diagnostic system when used as a 'pre-filtering' tool successfully reduced the number of images requiring human grading by 74.3%: this was achieved by identifying and excluding images without sight threatening maculopathy from manual screening