Vessel Extraction of Conjunctival Images Using LBPs and ANFIS

Abstract

The main goal of medical imaging applications is to diagnose some diseases, try to prevent the progression of them, and actually cure the patients. The number of people that suffer from diabetes is growing very fast these recent years in many countries and it is needed to diagnose this disease in the beginning to prevent the subsequent side effects like blindness and so on. One of the first ways to detect this disease is analysis of vessels in some parts of the eye such as retina and conjunctiva. Some studies have been done on effects of vessel changes of conjunctiva in diabetes diagnosis and it is proved that conjunctival vessel extraction and analysis is a good way for this purpose. In this paper, we proposed a method to detect and extract the vessels of conjunctiva automatically. It is the first stage of the process of diabetes diagnosis. We first extract some textural features from each pixel of the conjunctiva image using LBP and then classify each pixel to vessels or nonvessels according to the features vector based on a supervised classifier, ANFIS. We tested the proposed algorithm on 40 conjunctival images to show the performance and efficiency of our method.