DIABETIC RETHINOPATHY SCREENING BY BRIGHT LESIONS EXTRACTION FROM FUNDUS IMAGES

Veronika Hanúsková – Jarmila Pavlovičová – Miloš Oravec – Radoslav Blaško

   Retinal images are nowadays widely used to diagnose many diseases, for example diabetic retinopathy. In our work, we propose the algorithm for the screening application, which identifies the patients with such severe diabetic complication as diabetic retinopathy is, in early phase. In the application we use the patient's fundus photography without any additional examination by an ophtalmologist. After this screening identification, other examination methods should be considered and the patient's follow-up by a doctor is necessary. Our application is composed of three principal modules including fundus image preprocessing, feature extraction and feature classification. Image preprocessing module has the role of luminance normalization, contrast enhancement and optical disk masking. Feature extraction module includes two stages: bright lesions candidates localization and candidates feature extraction. We selected 16 statistical and structural features. For feature classification, we use multilayer perceptron (MLP) with one hidden layer. We classify images into two classes. Feature classification efficiency is about 93 percent.

Keywords: diabetic retinopathy, fundus images, automatic diagnostic and screening, machine learning, neural networks

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