Hard exudate detection in retinal fundus images using supervised learning

Exudate identification in retinal fundus images using precise textural verifications

One of the most salient diseases of retina is Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) which may lead to irreparable damages to eye vision in the advanced phases. A large number of the people infected with diabetes experience DR. The early identification of DR signs facilitates the treatment process and prevents from blindness. Hard Exudates (HE) are bright lesions appeared in retinal fundus images of DR patients. Thus, the detection of HEs is an important task preventing the progress of DR. However, the detection of HEs is a challenging process due to their different appearance features. In this paper, an automatic method for the identification of HEs with various sizes and shapes is proposed. The method works based on a pixel-wise approach. It considers several semi-circular regions around each pixel. For each semi-circular region, the intensity changes around several directions and non-necessarily equal radiuses are computed. All pixels for which several semi-circular regions include considerable intensity changes are considered as the pixels located in HEs. In order to reduce false positives, an optic disc localization method is proposed in the post-processing phase. The performance of the proposed method has been evaluated on DIARETDB0 and DIARETDB1 datasets. The experimental results confirm the improved performance of the suggested method in term of accuracy.

Image based early detection of diabetic retinopathy: A systematic review on Artificial Intelligence (AI) based recent trends and approaches

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a disease that damages the retina of the human eye due to diabetic complications, resulting in a loss of vision. Blindness may be avoided If the DR disease is detected at an early stage. Unfortunately, DR is irreversible process, however, early detection and treatment of DR can significantly reduce the risk of vision loss. The manual diagnosis done by ophthalmologists on DR retina fundus images is time consuming, and error prone process. Nowadays, machine learning and deep learning have become one of the most effective approaches, which have even surpassed the human performance as well as performance of traditional image processing-based algorithms and other computer aided diagnosis systems in the analysis and classification of medical images. This paper addressed and evaluated the various recent state-of-the-art methodologies that have been used for detection and classification of Diabetic Retinopathy disease using machine learning and deep learning approaches in the past decade. Furthermore, this study also provides the authors observation and performance evaluation of available research using several parameters, such as accuracy, disease status, and sensitivity. Finally, we conclude with limitations, remedies, and future directions in DR detection. In addition, various challenging issues that need further study are also discussed.

A Smart Healthcare Recommendation System for Multidisciplinary Diabetes Patients with Data Fusion Based on Deep Ensemble Learning

The prediction of human diseases precisely is still an uphill battle task for better and timely treatment. A multidisciplinary diabetic disease is a life-threatening disease all over the world. It attacks different vital parts of the human body, like Neuropathy, Retinopathy, Nephropathy, and ultimately Heart. A smart healthcare recommendation system predicts and recommends the diabetic disease accurately using optimal machine learning models with the data fusion technique on healthcare datasets. Various machine learning models and methods have been proposed in the recent past to predict diabetes disease. Still, these systems cannot handle the massive number of multifeatures datasets on diabetes disease properly. A smart healthcare recommendation system is proposed for diabetes disease based on deep machine learning and data fusion perspectives. Using data fusion, we can eliminate the irrelevant burden of system computational capabilities and increase the proposed system's performance to predict and recommend this life-threatening disease more accurately. Finally, the ensemble machine learning model is trained for diabetes prediction. This intelligent recommendation system is evaluated based on a well-known diabetes dataset, and its performance is compared with the most recent developments from the literature. The proposed system achieved 99.6% accuracy, which is higher compared to the existing deep machine learning methods. Therefore, our proposed system is better for multidisciplinary diabetes disease prediction and recommendation. Our proposed system's improved disease diagnosis performance advocates for its employment in the automated diagnostic and recommendation systems for diabetic patients.

Effective Fundus Image Decomposition for the Detection of Red Lesions and Hard Exudates to Aid in the Diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is characterized by the presence of red lesions (RLs), such as microaneurysms and hemorrhages, and bright lesions, such as exudates (EXs). Early DR diagnosis is paramount to prevent serious sight damage. Computer-assisted diagnostic systems are based on the detection of those lesions through the analysis of fundus images. In this paper, a novel method is proposed for the automatic detection of RLs and EXs. As the main contribution, the fundus image was decomposed into various layers, including the lesion candidates, the reflective features of the retina, and the choroidal vasculature visible in tigroid retinas. We used a proprietary database containing 564 images, randomly divided into a training set and a test set, and the public database DiaretDB1 to verify the robustness of the algorithm. Lesion detection results were computed per pixel and per image. Using the proprietary database, 88.34% per-image accuracy (ACCi), 91.07% per-pixel positive predictive value (PPVp), and 85.25% per-pixel sensitivity (SEp) were reached for the detection of RLs. Using the public database, 90.16% ACCi, 96.26% PPV_p, and 84.79% SEp were obtained. As for the detection of EXs, 95.41% ACCi, 96.01% PPV_p, and 89.42% SE_p were reached with the proprietary database. Using the public database, 91.80% ACCi, 98.59% PPVp, and 91.65% SEp were obtained. The proposed method could be useful to aid in the diagnosis of DR, reducing the workload of specialists and improving the attention to diabetic patients.