Automatic Detection of Microaneurysms in OCT Images Using Bag of Features

Micro aneurysm detection using optimized residual-based temporal attention Convolutional Neural Network with Inception-V3 transfer learning

In this manuscript micro aneurysm detection using residual-based temporal attention Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Inception-V3 transfer learning optimized with equilibrium optimization algorithm (MA-RTCNN-Inception V3-EOA) is proposed. The proposed research work contains four phases: (1) pre-processing, (2) segmentation, (3) post-processing, and (4) classification. At first, guided box filtering for contrast enhancement and background exclusion of input image. The proposed MA-RTCNN-Inception V3-EOA based classification framework is implemented in MATLAB using several performances evaluating metrics like precision, sensitivity, f-measure, specificity, accuracy, classification error rate, and Matthews's correlation coefficient and RoC analysis. The experimental outcome demonstrates that the proposed method provides 23.56%, 14.99%, and 21.37% higher accuracy and 31.26%, 57.69%, and 21.14% minimum classification error rate compared to existing methods, such as diabetic retinopathy identification utilizing prognosis of micro aneurysm and early diagnosis for non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy depending on deep learning approaches (DRD-CNN-NPDR), a magnified adaptive feature pyramid network for automatic micro aneurysms identification (MAFPN-AMD-MAFP-Net) respectively. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Micro aneurysm detection using residual-based temporal attention Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed. To get rid of the retina background, guided box filtering is applied. COAT is used for segmenting the images into smaller parts RTCNN is used for accurate micro aneurysms disease classification. RT-CNN algorithm successfully identifies the micro aneurysms using EOA.

Automatic detection of microaneurysms in optical coherence tomography images of retina using convolutional neural networks and transfer learning

Microaneurysms (MAs) are pathognomonic signs that help clinicians to detect diabetic retinopathy (DR) in the early stages. Automatic detection of MA in retinal images is an active area of research due to its application in screening processes for DR which is one of the main reasons of blindness amongst the working-age population. The focus of these works is on the automatic detection of MAs in en face retinal images like fundus color and Fluorescein Angiography (FA). On the other hand, detection of MAs from Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images has 2 main advantages: first, OCT is a non-invasive imaging technique that does not require injection, therefore is safer. Secondly, because of the proven application of OCT in detection of Age-Related Macular Degeneration, Diabetic Macular Edema, and normal cases, thanks to detecting MAs in OCT, extensive information is obtained by using this imaging technique. In this research, the concentration is on the diagnosis of MAs using deep learning in the OCT images which represent in-depth structure of retinal layers. To this end, OCT B-scans should be divided into strips and MA patterns should be searched in the resulted strips. Since we need a dataset comprising OCT image strips with suitable labels and such large labelled datasets are not yet available, we have created it. For this purpose, an exact registration method is utilized to align OCT images with FA photographs. Then, with the help of corresponding FA images, OCT image strips are created from OCT B-scans in four labels, namely MA, normal, abnormal, and vessel. Once the dataset of image strips is prepared, a stacked generalization (stacking) ensemble of four fine-tuned, pre-trained convolutional neural networks is trained to classify the strips of OCT images into the mentioned classes. FA images are used once to create OCT strips for training process and they are no longer needed for subsequent steps. Once the stacking ensemble model is obtained, it will be used to classify the OCT strips in the test process. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework classifies overall OCT image strips and OCT strips containing MAs with accuracy scores of 0.982 and 0.987, respectively.