Identification of Microaneurysms and Exudates for Early Detection of Diabetic Retinopathy

Abstract

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a condition that may be a complication of diabetes, and it can damage both the retina and other small blood vessels throughout the body. Microaneurysms (MA's) and Hard exudates (HE's) are two symptoms that occur in the early stage of DR. Accurate and reliable detection of MA's and HE's in color fundus images has great importance for DR screening. Here, a machine learning algorithm has been presented in this paper that detects MA's and HE's in fundus images of the retina. In this research a dynamic thresholding and fuzzy c mean clustering with characteristic feature extraction and different classification techniques are used for detection of MA's and HE's. The performance of system is evaluated by computing the parameters like sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and precision. The results are compared between different types of classifiers. The Logistic Regression classifier (LRC) performance is good when compared with other classifiers with an accuracy of 94.6% in detection of MA's and 96.2% in detection of HE's.