Automatic Segmentation of Microaneurysm in Retinal Fundus Images

Abstract

Diabetes interferes with the body’s ability to use and store sugar (glucose), which it can cause damage throughout the body. Generally, Microaneurysm (MA) is the first clinically observable lesions in the Diabetic Retinopathy (DR). Since interference of biological objects in eye fundus images are similar to MA, locate Microaneurysm lesions precisely is a challenging task for researches. This research employs U-Net Convolutional Neural Network to model saliency of objects in images, global and local context are both taken into account to provide a better initialization for the process. Feature extraction techniques are applied first to assign a local saliency value to each pixel by considering its local context from fundus images such as ORB, SURF, and MSER. The extracted feature vectors are applied for training the network. The sum of the weighted salient object regions produce the final saliency map, then implements U-Net to segment MA lesions.Our experiment has carried out using the publicly available Indian Diabetic Retinopathy Image Dataset (IDRiD), which has used in "Diabetic Retinopathy: Segmentation and Grading Challenge" workshop and our proposed method has given an outstanding accuracy of 98.78 %.