Automated Diagnostic Hybrid Lesion Detection System for Diabetic Retinopathy Abnormalities

Background: Early diagnosis, monitoring disease progression, and timely treatment of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) abnormalities can efficiently prevent visual loss. A prediction system for the early intervention and prevention of eye diseases is important. The contrast of raw fundus image is also a hindrance in effective manual lesion detection technique. Methods: In this research paper, an automated lesion detection diagnostic scheme has been proposed for early detection of retinal abnormalities of red and yellow pathological lesions. The algorithm of the proposed Hybrid Lesion Detection (HLD) includes retinal image pre-processing, blood vessel extraction, optical disc localization and detection stages for detecting the presence of diabetic retinopathy lesions. Automated diagnostic systems assist the ophthalmologists practice manual lesion detection techniques which are tedious and time-consuming. Detailed statistical analysis is performed on the extracted shape, intensity and GLCM features and the optimal features are selected to classify DR abnormalities. Exhaustive statistical investigation of the proposed approach using visual and empirical analysis resulted in 31 significant features. Results: The results show that the HLD approach achieved good classification results in terms of three statistical indices: accuracy, 98.9%; sensitivity, 97.8%; and specificity, 100% with significantly less complexity. Conclusion: The proposed technique with optimal features demonstrates improvement in accuracy as compared to state of the art techniques using the same database.