Diabetic Retinopathy Detection Using Machine Learning and Texture Features

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Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a medical condition due to diabetes mellitus that can damage the patient retina and cause blood leaks. This condition can cause different symptoms from mild vision problems to complete blindness if it is not timely treated. Hemorrhages, hard Exudates, and Micro-aneurysms (HEM) that appear in the retina are the early signs of DR. Early diagnosis of HEM is crucial to prevent blindness. Textures features such as LBP have been widely used in the past as a technique for DR detection. In this work, we introduce the use of different texture features for DR, mainly Local Ternary Pattern (LTP) and Local Energy-based Shape Histogram (LESH). We show that they outperform LBP extracted features. Support Vector Machines (SVM) are used for the classification of the extracted histogram. A histogram binning scheme for features representation is proposed. The experimental results show that LESH is the best performing technique with an obtained accuracy of 0.904 using SVM with a Radial Basis Function kernel (SVM-RBF). Similarly, the analysis of the ROC curve shows that LESH with SVM-RBF gives the best AUC (Area Under Curve) performance with 0.931.