An efficient method for early stage detection of diabetic retinopathy

Abstract

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of blindness. The early detection and treatment of DR is significant to save the human vision. The presence of microaneurysms (MAs) is the first sign of the disease. The correct identification of MAs is an essential for finding of DR at the early stages. In this paper, we propose a three phase system for efficient recognition of MAs. The tentative MA lesions are recovered from the fundus image in the first stage. To accurately classify an extracted candidate region into MA or non-MA, the second stage prepares an attribute vector for each tentative MA lesion based on shape, intensity and statistical properties. The third stage is a classification step to classify as MAs and Non-MAs for early stage detection of DR. We present a holoentropy enabled decision tree classifier which combines entropy and total correlation. The best feature for decision tree is selected based on holoentropy to enhance the correctness of the classification. The implemented system is experimented using fundus image database DIARETDB1. The proposed method achieved an overall accuracy of 97.67%.The proposed system has detected the MAs with higher performance using simple features and holoentropy based decision tree classifier. The proposed system is suitable for early stage detection of DR through the accurate identification of MAs.