Automated identification of diabetic retinopathy stages using digital fundus images.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is caused by damage to the small blood vessels of the retina in the posterior part of the eye of the diabetic patient. The main stages of diabetic retinopathy are non-proliferate diabetes retinopathy (NPDR) and proliferate diabetes retinopathy (PDR). The retinal fundus photographs are widely used in the diagnosis and treatment of various eye diseases in clinics. It is also one of the main resources for mass screening of diabetic retinopathy. In this work, we have proposed a computer-based approach for the detection of diabetic retinopathy stage using fundus images. Image preprocessing, morphological processing techniques and texture analysis methods are applied on the fundus images to detect the features such as area of hard exudates, area of the blood vessels and the contrast. Our protocol uses total of 140 subjects consisting of two stages of DR and normal. Our extracted features are statistically significant (p < 0.0001) with distinct mean +/- SD as shown in Table 1. These features are then used as an input to the artificial neural network (ANN) for an automatic classification. The detection results are validated by comparing it with expert ophthalmologists. We demonstrated a classification accuracy of 93%, sensitivity of 90% and specificity of 100%.