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Automatic retinal image registration is still a great challenge in computer aided diagnosis and screening system. In this paper, a new retinal image registration method is proposed based on the combination of blood vessel segmentation and scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) feature. The algorithm includes two stages: retinal image segmentation and registration. In the segmentation stage, the blood vessel is segmented by using the guided filter to enhance the vessel structure and the bottom-hat transformation to extract blood vessel. In the registration stage, the SIFT algorithm is adopted to detect the feature of vessel segmentation image, complemented by using a random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm to eliminate incorrect matches. We evaluate our method from both segmentation and registration aspects. For segmentation evaluation, we test our method on DRIVE database, which provides manually labeled images from two specialists. The experimental results show that our method achieves 0.9562 in accuracy (Acc), which presents competitive performance compare to other existing segmentation methods. For registration evaluation, we test our method on STARE database, and the experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method, which makes the algorithm a suitable tool for automated retinal image analysis.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of blindness in a significant portion of the working population, and its damage on vision is irreversible. Therefore, rapid diagnosis on DR is crucial for saving the patient’s eyesight. Since Transformer shows superior performance in the field of computer vision compared with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), it has been proposed and applied in computer aided diagnosis of DR. However, a large number of images should be used for training due to the lack of inductive bias in Transformers. It has been demonstrated that the retinal vessels follow self-similar fractal scaling law, and the fractal dimension of DR patients shows an evident difference from that of normal people. Based on this, the fractal dimension is introduced as a prior into Transformers to mitigate the adverse influence of lack of inductive bias on model performance. A new Transformer method pretrained with Masked Autoencoders and fractal dimension (MAEFD) is developed and proposed in this paper. The experiments on the APTOS dataset show that the classification performance for DR by the proposed MAEFD can be substantially improved. Additionally, the present model pretrained with 100,000 retinal images outperforms that pretrained with 1 million natural images in terms of DR classification performance.

Oculopathy is a widespread disease among people of all ages around the world. Teleophthalmology can facilitate the ophthalmological diagnosis for less developed countries that lack medical resources. In teleophthalmology, the assessment of retinal image quality is of great importance. In this paper, we propose a no-reference retinal image assessment system based on DenseNet, a convolutional neural network architecture. This system classified fundus images into good and bad quality or five categories: adequate, just noticeable blur, inappropriate illumination, incomplete optic disc, and opacity. The proposed system was evaluated on different datasets and compared to the applications based on other two networks: VGG-16 and GoogLenet. For binary classification, the good-and-bad binary classifier achieves an AUC of 1.000, and the degradation-specified classifiers that distinguish one specified degradation versus the rest achieve AUC values of 0.972, 0.990, 0.982, 0.982 for four categories, respectively. The multi-classification based on DenseNet achieves an overall accuracy of 0.927, which is significantly higher than 0.549 and 0.757 obtained using VGG-16 and GoogLeNet, respectively. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach produces outstanding performance in retinal image quality assessment and is worth applying in ophthalmological telemedicine applications. In addition, the proposed approach is robust to the image noise. This study fills the gap of multi-classification in retinal image quality assessment.

Glaucoma is an eye disease that usually occurs with the increased Intra-Ocular Pressure (IOP), which damages the vision of eyes. So, detecting and classifying Glaucoma is an important and demanding task in recent days. For this purpose, some of the clustering and segmentation techniques are proposed in the existing works. But, it has some drawbacks that include inefficient, inaccurate and estimates only the affected area. In order to solve these issues, a Neighboring Differential Clustering (NDC) — Intensity Variation Masking (IVM) are proposed in this paper. The main intention of this work is to extract and diagnose the abnormal retinal image by identifying the optic disc. This work includes three stages such as, preprocessing, clustering and segmentation. At first, the given retinal image is preprocessed by using the Gaussian Mask Updated (GMU) model for eliminating the noise and improving the quality of the image. Then, the cluster is formed by extracting the threshold and patterns with the help of NDC technique. In the segmentation stage, the weight is calculated for pixel matching and ROI extraction by using the proposed IVM method. Here, the novelty is presented in the clustering and segmentation processes by developing NDC and IVM algorithms for accurate Glaucoma identification. In experiments, the results of both existing and proposed techniques are evaluated in terms of sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, Hausdorff distance, Jaccard and dice metrics.

Diabetes is the most prevalent disease that affects the retina and leads to blindness without any symptoms. An adverse change in retinal blood vessels that leads to vision loss is called as Diabetic Retinopathy (DR). DR is one among the leading causes of blindness worldwide. There is an increasing interest to design the medical system for screening and diagnosis of DR. Segmentation of exudates is essential for diagnostic purpose. In this regard, Optic Disc (OD) center is detected by template matching technique and then it is masked to avoid misclassification in the results of exudates detection. In this paper, we proposed a novel K-Means nearest neighbor algorithm, combining K-means with morphology and Fuzzy to segment exudates. The main advantage of the proposed approach is that it does not depend upon manually selected parameters. Performances of these algorithms are compared with existing algorithms like Fuzzy C means (FCM) and Spatially Weighted Fuzzy C Means (SWFCM). These different segmentation algorithms are applied to publically available STARE data set and it is found that mean sensitivity, specificity and accuracy values for the fuzzy algorithm is 91%, 94% and 93% respectively and considerably higher than other algorithms.

Retinal images have been widely used by clinicians for early diagnosis of ocular diseases. However, the quality of retinal images is often clinically unsatisfactory due to eye lesions and imperfect imaging processes. The non-uniform or poor illumination on retinal images hinders the pathological information and further impairs the diagnosis of ophthalmologists. To solve these issues, we propose a deep learning-based retinal image non-uniform illumination removal called NuI-Go, which combines the powerful capabilities of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with the characteristics of retinal images with non-uniform illumination. Concretely, the proposed NuI-Go consists of three Recursive non-local encoder–decoder residual blocks (NEDRBs) for progressively enhancing the degraded retinal images. Each NEDRB contains a feature encoder module that captures the hierarchical feature representations, a non-local context module that models the context information, and a feature decoder module that recovers the details and spatial dimension. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic dataset and real retinal images. Besides, we further demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method for improving the performance of retinal vessel segmentation.