Abstract
Digital retinal imaging is a challenging screening method for which effective, robust and cost-effective approaches are still to be developed. Regular screening for diabetic retinopathy and diabetic maculopathy diseases is necessary in order to identify the group at risk of visual impairment. This paper presents a novel automatic detection of diabetic retinopathy and maculopathy in eye fundus images by employing fuzzy image processing techniques. The paper first introduces the existing systems for diabetic retinopathy screening, with an emphasis on the maculopathy detection methods. The proposed medical decision support system consists of four parts, namely: image acquisition, image preprocessing including four retinal structures localisation, feature extraction and the classification of diabetic retinopathy and maculopathy. A combination of fuzzy image processing techniques, the Circular Hough Transform and several feature extraction methods are implemented in the proposed system. The paper also presents a novel technique for the macula region localisation in order to detect the maculopathy. In addition to the proposed detection system, the paper highlights a novel online dataset and it presents the dataset collection, the expert diagnosis process and the advantages of our online database compared to other public eye fundus image databases for diabetic retinopathy purposes.
Highlights
Diabetic retinopathy is one of the eye complications caused by the diabetes mellitus, which causes other problems such as stroke, cardiovascular disease, diabetic nephropathy and diabetic neuropathy
Punnolil [39] proposed an approach for the diabetic maculopathy grading by implementing the detection of the retinal structures, such as optic disc, macula and fovea followed by the detection of the lesions including the exudates, haemorrhages and microaneurysms
These were later graded into classes of diabetic maculopathy using a multiclass Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifier based on the extracted features
Summary
Diabetic retinopathy is one of the eye complications caused by the diabetes mellitus, which causes other problems such as stroke, cardiovascular disease, diabetic nephropathy and diabetic neuropathy. There are other diabetic retinopathy signs, such as haemorrhages, i.e. red lesions caused by the rupture of the small blood vessels in the deeper layers of the retina. Exudates, which are yellow–white lesions caused by plasma leakage from the capillaries, are another type of common features of diabetic retinopathy. Diabetic maculopathy affects the visual function through the macular ischaemia and increased retinal vascular permeability resulting in macular oedema [3]. Maculopathy is represented by yellow lesions near the macula region and it is the diabetes damage near the fovea. 4 presents the proposed system for the detection of diabetic retinopathy and maculopathy in eye fundus images by using fuzzy image processing.
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