A mobile computer aided system for optic nerve head detection

Abstract

Background and objectiveThe detection of optic nerve head (ONH) in retinal fundus images plays a key role in identifying Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) as well as other abnormal conditions in eye examinations. This paper presents a method and its associated software towards the development of an Android smartphone app based on a previously developed ONH detection algorithm. The development of this app and the use of the d-Eye lens which can be snapped onto a smartphone provide a mobile and cost-effective computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system in ophthalmology. In particular, this CAD system would allow eye examination to be conducted in remote locations with limited access to clinical facilities. MethodsA pre-processing step is first carried out to enable the ONH detection on the smartphone platform. Then, the optimization steps taken to run the algorithm in a computationally and memory efficient manner on the smartphone platform is discussed. ResultsThe smartphone code of the ONH detection algorithm was applied to the STARE and DRIVE databases resulting in about 96% and 100% detection rates, respectively, with an average execution time of about 2 s and 1.3 s. In addition, two other databases captured by the d-Eye and iExaminer snap-on lenses for smartphones were considered resulting in about 93% and 91% detection rates, respectively, with an average execution time of about 2.7 s and 2.2 s, respectively.