Red Lesion Detection in Retinal Fundus Image for Diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy

Abstract

Diabetes retinopathy is a consequence of diabetes mellitus. It is one of the major reasons of avoidable blindness in rural as well as urban areas. This disease is mainly caused if body is not able to produce enough insulin, causing high blood sugar levels. The minute vessels in the retinal areas get swollen due to high sugar levels in blood, resulting them to rapture and spread of blood in the retinal region. This results in to haemorrhages, i.e. red lesions in retina. With the advancements in the field of image processing, these lesions are easily detected at earlier stage to avoid further consequences. In this research work, the morphological approach has been developed to detect these lesions. This mainly includes pre-processing, detection and elimination of fovea and blood vessels. The microaneurysms being minute lesions are eliminated to detect haemorrhages. The proposed work is carried out on Indian diabetic retinopathy image dataset (IDRiD). The accuracy, sensitivity and specificity achieved with this approach is noted as 98.22%, 75.3% and 91.65%, respectively.