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.

Abstract-The detection of microaneurysms in digital color fundus photographs is a critical first step in automated screening for diabetic retinopathy (DR), a common complication of diabetes. To accomplish this detection numerous methods have been published in the past but none of these was compared with each other on the same data. In this work we present the results of the first international microaneurysm detection competition, organized in The overall results show that microaneurysm detection is a challenging task for both the automatic methods as well as the human expert. There is room for improvement as the best performing system does not reach the performance of the human expert. The data associated with the ROC microaneurysm detection competition will remain publicly available and the website will continue accepting submissions.

The FLIO allows reproducible measurements of fluorescence lifetimes of the macula in healthy subjects. By using a custom-built software, we were able to quantify fluorescence lifetimes within the ETDRS grid. Establishing a clinically accessible standard against which to measure FAF lifetimes within the retina is a prerequisite for future studies in retinal disease.