Diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy Utilizing Computer-Aided Diagnosis System

Abstract

Purpose: Diabetes is considered one of most diseases spread among people; blindness is considered the most resulted effect. Diabetes can damage the retinal blood vessels and cause severe problems to the eyes, which may end with sight loss. Such medical condition is known as "diabetic retinopathy" (DR). In such a diagnosis, the retinal microvascular go through several stages of change threat. In the early stages of the DR, detecting the formation that happened to the retinal blood vessels helps prevent the disease's dangerous effects. Therefore, producing a method to diagnose the disease in the early stages is helpful. So, this work aimed to develop a system of detecting and classifying the retina formation, trying to avoid relevant effects.Methodology: The current method depends on vascular edges map extracted from images of retina captured by a fundus camera. Such a map been utilized to extract quantitative texture features. The system tested two independent groups of the region of interest in normal and abnormal images. The two sets were extracted from ground truth images of the 89 fundus images. Fundus images were annotated images from the Standard Diabetic Retinopathy Database (DIARETDB1).Findings: The system provided an accuracy of 71% with a sensitivity of 75%.Recommendation: The current work may open an opportunity for improvement for future work. Other methods may be reached to raise the accuracy and the sensitivity of the system. Besides, the current system may be tested on a larger sample size to study such effects. Finally, the ease of the current method makes it faster in adoption in the appropriate diagnosis especially in the early stages.