Detection of Abnormal Blood Vessels on Optic Disc for Diagnosis of Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy

Abstract

Optic disc is an important anatomical feature of the retinal image and helps in the diagnosis of eye diseases which appears as a bright circular or elliptic shape in retinal image. Accurate detection of the optic disc is useful for the diagnosis of different diseases including new vessels on optic disc. Proliferative diabetic retinopathy is an advanced stage of diabetic retinopathy and causes severe visual impairments. Early detection of diabetic retinopathy is important for the protection and loss of patient’s vision. Automated systems for screening of proliferative diabetic retinopathy should accurately detect the blood vessels to identify vascular abnormalities. In the proposed method the vascular pattern of normal and abnormal or new vessels is extracted using Gabor wavelet and segmenting the blood vessels using active contour method. Support vector machine is used for the classification of neovascularization. The proposed method is evaluated using publicly available retinal image databases and results show that the proposed method identifies the vascular abnormalities with high accuracy.