Peripapillary atrophy detection by biologically inspired feature

Peripapillary atrophy (PPA) is an atrophy of preexisting retina tissue. Because of its association with eye diseases such as myopia and glaucoma, it is important to determine the presence of PPA clinically. Experienced ophthalmologists are able to determine the presence of PPA using visual information from the retinal images. However, it is tedious, time consuming and subjective to examine all images especially in a screening program. This paper presents biologically inspired feature (BIF) for the automatic detection of PPA. BIF mimics the process of cortex for visual perception. In the proposed method, a focal region is segmented from the retinal image and the BIF is extracted. Experimental results show that the proposed BIF based approach achieves an accuracy of more than 90% in detecting PPA, much better than previous methods. It can be used to save the workload of ophthalmologists and thus reduce the diagnosis costs.