Segmentation and texture analysis with multimodel inference for the automatic detection of exudates in early diabetic retinopathy

Jack Lee, Benny Zee, Qing Li

Division of Biostatistics, JC School of Public Health and Primary Care, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.

DOI: 10.4236/jbise.2013.63038                

Abstract

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is an eye disease caused by the increase of insulin in blood and may cause blindness if not treated at an early stage. Exudates are the primary sign of DR. Currently there is no fully automated method to detect exudates in the literature and it would be useful in large scale screening if fully automatic method is available. In this paper we developed a novel method to detect exudates that based on interactions between texture analysis and segmentation with mathematical morphological technique by using multimodel inference. The texture analysis involves three components: they are statistical texture analysis, high order spectra analysis, and fractal analysis. The performance of the proposed method is assessed by the sensitivity, specificity and accuracy using the public data DIARETDB1. Our results show that the sensitivity, specificity and accuracy are 95.7%, 97.6% and 98.7% (SE = 0.01), respectively. It is shown that the proposed method can be run automatically and also improve the accuracy of exudates detection significantly over most of the previous methods.

Keywords

Texture Analysis; Multimodel Inference; Morphological Technique; Exudates; Diabetic Retinopathy

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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