Computerized Approaches for Retinal Microaneurysm Detection

The number of diabetic patients throughout the world is increasing with a very high rate. The patients suffering from long term diabetes have a very high risk of generating retinal disorder called Diabetic Retinopathy(DR). The disease is a complication of diabetes and may results in irreversible blindness to the patient. Early diagnosis and routine checkups by expert ophthalmologist possibly prevent the vision loss. But the number of people to be screen exceeds the number of experts, especially in rural areas. Thus the computerized screening systems are needed which will accurately screen the large amount of population and identify healthy and diseased people. Thus the workload on experts is reduced significantly. Microaneurysms(MA) are first recognizable signs of DR. Thus early detection of DR requires accurate detection of Microaneurysms. Computerized diagnosis insures reliable and accurate detection of MA's. The paper overviews the approaches for computerized detection of retinal Microaneurysms

Retinal Image Analysis: A Review

Images of the eye ground or retina not only provide an insight to important parts of the visual system but also reflect the general state of health of the entire human body. Automated retina image analysis is becoming an important screening tool for early detection of certain risks and diseases like diabetic retinopathy, hypertensive retinopathy, age related macular degeneration, glaucoma etc. This can in turn be used to reduce human errors or to provide services to remote areas. In this review paper, we discuss some of the current techniques used to automatically detect the important clinical features of retinal image, such as the blood vessels, optic disc and macula. The quantitative analysis and measurements of these features can be used to better understand the relationship between various diseases and the retinal features

Automatic detection of microaneurysms in colour fundus images for diabetic retinopathy screening.

Regular eye screening is essential for the early detection and treatment of the diabetic retinopathy. This paper presents a novel automatic screening system for diabetic retinopathy that focuses on the detection of the earliest visible signs of retinopathy, which are microaneurysms. Microaneurysms are small dots on the retina, formed by ballooning out of a weak part of the capillary wall. The detection of the microaneurysms at an early stage is vital, and it is the first step in preventing the diabetic retinopathy. The paper first explores the existing systems and applications related to diabetic retinopathy screening, with a focus on the microaneurysm detection methods. The proposed decision support system consists of an automatic acquisition, screening and classification of diabetic retinopathy colour fundus images, which could assist in the detection and management of the diabetic retinopathy. Several feature extraction methods and the circular Hough transform have been employed in the proposed microaneurysm detection system, alongside the fuzzy histogram equalisation method. The latter method has been applied in the preprocessing stage of the diabetic retinopathy eye fundus images and provided improved results for detecting the microaneurysms

Automatic Screening and Classification of Diabetic Retinopathy Eye Fundus Image

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a disorder of the retinal vasculature. It develops to some degree in nearly all patients with long-standing diabetes mellitus and can result in blindness. Screening of DR is essential for both early detection and early treatment. This thesis aims to investigate automatic methods for diabetic retinopathy detection and subsequently develop an effective system for the detection and screening of diabetic retinopathy. The presented diabetic retinopathy research involves three development stages. Firstly, the thesis presents the development of a preliminary classification and screening system for diabetic retinopathy using eye fundus images. The research will then focus on the detection of the earliest signs of diabetic retinopathy, which are the microaneurysms. The detection of microaneurysms at an early stage is vital and is the first step in preventing diabetic retinopathy. Finally, the thesis will present decision support systems for the detection of diabetic retinopathy and maculopathy in eye fundus images. The detection of maculopathy, which are yellow lesions near the macula, is essential as it will eventually cause the loss of vision if the affected macula is not treated in time. An accurate retinal screening, therefore, is required to assist the retinal screeners to classify the retinal images effectively. Highly efficient and accurate image processing techniques must thus be used in order to produce an effective screening of diabetic retinopathy. In addition to the proposed diabetic retinopathy detection systems, this thesis will present a new dataset, and will highlight the dataset collection, the expert diagnosis process and the advantages of the new dataset, compared to other public eye fundus images datasets available. The new dataset will be useful to researchers and practitioners working in the retinal imaging area and would widely encourage comparative studies in the field of diabetic retinopathy research. It is envisaged that the proposed decision support system for clinical screening would greatly contribute to and assist the management and the detection of diabetic retinopathy. It is also hoped that the developed automatic detection techniques will assist clinicians to diagnose diabetic retinopathy at an early stage

Digital ocular fundus imaging: a review

Ocular fundus imaging plays a key role in monitoring the health status of the human eye. Currently, a large number of imaging modalities allow the assessment and/or quantification of ocular changes from a healthy status. This review focuses on the main digital fundus imaging modality, color fundus photography, with a brief overview of complementary techniques, such as fluorescein angiography. While focusing on two-dimensional color fundus photography, the authors address the evolution from nondigital to digital imaging and its impact on diagnosis. They also compare several studies performed along the transitional path of this technology. Retinal image processing and analysis, automated disease detection and identification of the stage of diabetic retinopathy (DR) are addressed as well. The authors emphasize the problems of image segmentation, focusing on the major landmark structures of the ocular fundus: the vascular network, optic disk and the fovea. Several proposed approaches for the automatic detection of signs of disease onset and progression, such as microaneurysms, are surveyed. A thorough comparison is conducted among different studies with regard to the number of eyes/subjects, imaging modality, fundus camera used, field of view and image resolution to identify the large variation in characteristics from one study to another. Similarly, the main features of the proposed classifications and algorithms for the automatic detection of DR are compared, thereby addressing computer-aided diagnosis and computer-aided detection for use in screening programs.Fundação para a Ciência e TecnologiaFEDErPrograma COMPET

NON-INVASIVE IMAGE DENOISING AND CONTRAST ENHANCEMENT TECHNIQUES FOR RETINAL FUNDUS IMAGES

The analysis of retinal vasculature in digital fundus images is important for diagnosing eye related diseases. However, digital colour fundus images suffer from low and varied contrast, and are also affected by noise, requiring the use of fundus angiogram modality. The Fundus Fluorescein Angiogram (FFA) modality gives 5 to 6 time’s higher contrast. However, FFA is an invasive method that requires contrast agents to be injected and this can lead other physiological problems. A reported digital image enhancement technique named RETICA that combines Retinex and ICA (Independent Component Analysis) techniques, reduces varied contrast, and enhances the low contrast blood vessels of model fundus images

Multimedia data mining for automatic diabetic retinopathy screening

International audience— This paper presents TeleOphta, an automatic sys-tem for screening diabetic retinopathy in teleophthalmology networks. Its goal is to reduce the burden on ophthalmologists by automatically detecting non referable examination records, i.e. examination records presenting no image quality problems and no pathological signs related to diabetic retinopathy or any other retinal pathology. TeleOphta is an attempt to put into practice years of algorithmic developments from our groups. It combines image quality metrics, specific lesion detectors and a generic pathological pattern miner to process the visual content of eye fundus photographs. This visual information is further combined with contextual data in order to compute an abnormality risk for each examination record. The TeleOphta system was trained and tested on a large dataset of 25,702 examination records from the OPHDIAT screening network in Paris. It was able to automatically detect 68% of the non referable examination records while achieving the same sensitivity as a second ophthalmologist. This suggests that it could safely reduce the burden on ophthalmologists by 56%