Abstract
Blindness which is considered as degrading disabling disease is the final stage that occurs when a certain threshold of visual acuity is overlapped. It happens with vision deficiencies that are pathologic states due to many ocular diseases. Among them, diabetic retinopathy is nowadays a chronic disease that attacks most of diabetic patients. Early detection through automatic screening programs reduces considerably expansion of the disease. Exudates are one of the earliest signs. This paper presents an automated method for exudates detection in digital retinal fundus image. The first step consists of image enhancement. It focuses on histogram expansion and median filter. The difference between filtered image and his inverse reduces noise and removes background while preserving features and patterns related to the exudates. The second step refers to blood vessel removal by using morphological operators. In the last step, we compute the result image with an algorithm based on Entropy Maximization Thresholding to obtain two segmented regions (optical disk and exudates) which were highlighted in the second step. Finally, according to size criteria, we eliminate the other regions obtain the regions of interest related to exudates. Evaluations were done with retinal fundus image DIARETDB1 database. DIARETDB1 gathers high-quality medical images which have been verified by experts. It consists of around 89 colour fundus images of which 84 contain at least mild non-proliferative signs of the diabetic retinopathy. This tool provides a unified framework for benchmarking the methods, but also points out clear deficiencies in the current practice in the method development. Comparing to other recent methods available in literature, we found that the proposed algorithm accomplished better result in terms of sensibility (94.27%) and specificity (97.63%).
Highlights
Diabetes is among number of diseases that involve problems with the hormone insulin
Diabetic retinopathy is a microvascular complication caused by diabetes which can lead to blindness
The color fundus images are playing a major role in the detection of exudates
Summary
Diabetes is among number of diseases that involve problems with the hormone insulin. It is a group of metabolic disorders in which there are high blood sugar levels over extended period. Diabetes is a well known pathology and may cause abnormalities in the retina (diabetic retinopathy), kidneys (diabetic nephropathy), and nervous system (diabetic neuropathy) and is known to be a major risk for cardiovascular diseases. Diabetic retinopathy is a microvascular complication caused by diabetes which can lead to blindness. In early stages of diabetic retinopathy typically there are no visible signs but the number and severity of abnormalities increase during the time. Diabetic retinopathy typically starts with small changes in retinal capillaries
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