Title :
Automated detection of red lesions from digital colour fundus photographs
Author :
Jaafar, Hussain F. ; Nandi, Asoke K. ; Al-Nuaimy, Waleed
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Electron., Univ. of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
fDate :
Aug. 30 2011-Sept. 3 2011
Abstract :
Earliest signs of diabetic retinopathy, the major cause of vision loss, are damage to the blood vessels and the formation of lesions in the retina. Early detection of diabetic retinopathy is essential for the prevention of blindness. In this paper we present a computer-aided system to automatically identify red lesions from retinal fundus photographs. After pre-processing, a morphological technique was used to segment red lesion candidates from the background and other retinal structures. Then a rule-based classifier was used to discriminate actual red lesions from artifacts. A novel method for blood vessel detection is also proposed to refine the detection of red lesions. For a standarised test set of 219 images, the proposed method can detect red lesions with a sensitivity of 89.7% and a specificity of 98.6% (at lesion level). The performance of the proposed method shows considerable promise for detection of red lesions as well as other types of lesions.
Keywords :
biomedical optical imaging; blood vessels; diseases; eye; feature extraction; image colour analysis; image segmentation; medical image processing; automated detection; blood vessels; diabetic retinopathy; digital colour fundus photographs; morphological technique; red lesions; rule-based classifier; vision loss; Biomedical imaging; Blood vessels; Databases; Diabetes; Image color analysis; Lesions; Retina; Algorithms; Artifacts; Automatic Data Processing; Automation; Colorimetry; Computer Graphics; Databases, Factual; Diabetic Retinopathy; Diagnostic Imaging; Fundus Oculi; Humans; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Pattern Recognition, Automated; Reproducibility of Results; Retina; Retinal Vessels; Sensitivity and Specificity;
Conference_Titel :
Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC, 2011 Annual International Conference of the IEEE
Conference_Location :
Boston, MA
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-4121-1
Electronic_ISBN :
1557-170X
DOI :
10.1109/IEMBS.2011.6091539