The Messidor database, which contains hundreds of eye fundus images, has been publicly distributed since 2008. It was created by the Messidor project in order to evaluate automatic lesion segmentation and diabetic retinopathy grading methods. Designing, producing and maintaining such a database entails significant costs. By publicly sharing it, one hopes to bring a valuable resource to the public research community. However, the real interest and benefit of the research community is not easy to quantify. We analyse here the feedback on the Messidor database, after more than 6 years of diffusion. This analysis should apply to other similar research databases.

Intacs technology can reduce the corneal steepening and astigmatism associated with keratoconus.

The diagnostic accuracy of computer detection programs has been reported to be comparable to that of specialists and expert readers, but no computer detection programs have been validated in an independent cohort using an internationally recognized diabetic retinopathy (DR) standard. Objective: To determine the sensitivity and specificity of the Iowa Detection Program (IDP) to detect referable diabetic retinopathy (RDR).

Deep learning is quickly becoming the leading methodology for medical image analysis. Given a large medical archive, where each image is associated with a diagnosis, efficient pathology detectors or classifiers can be trained with virtually no expert knowledge about the target pathologies. However, deep learning algorithms, including the popular ConvNets, are black boxes: little is known about the local patterns analyzed by ConvNets to make a decision at the image level. A solution is proposed in this paper to create heatmaps showing which pixels in images play a role in the image-level predictions. In other words, a ConvNet trained for image-level classification can be used to detect lesions as well. A generalization of the backpropagation method is proposed in order to train ConvNets that produce high-quality heatmaps. The proposed solution is applied to diabetic retinopathy (DR) screening in a dataset of almost 90,000 fundus photographs from the 2015 Kaggle Diabetic Retinopathy competition and a private dataset of almost 110,000 photographs (e-ophtha). For the task of detecting referable DR, very good detection performance was achieved: A=0.954 in Kaggle's dataset and A=0.949 in e-ophtha. Performance was also evaluated at the image level and at the lesion level in the DiaretDB1 dataset, where four types of lesions are manually segmented: microaneurysms, hemorrhages, exudates and cotton-wool spots. For the task of detecting images containing these four lesion types, the proposed detector, which was trained to detect referable DR, outperforms recent algorithms trained to detect those lesions specifically, with pixel-level supervision. At the lesion level, the proposed detector outperforms heatmap generation algorithms for ConvNets. This detector is part of the Messidor® system for mobile eye pathology screening. Because it does not rely on expert knowledge or manual segmentation for detecting relevant patterns, the proposed solution is a promising image mining tool, which has the potential to discover new biomarkers in images.