0000000000150473
AUTHOR
Luca Giancardo
AUTOMATIC QUALITY ENHANCEMENT AND NERVE FIBRE LAYER ARTEFACTS REMOVAL IN RETINA FUNDUS IMAGES BY OFF AXIS IMAGING
International audience; Retinal fundus images acquired with non-mydriatic digital fundus cameras are a versatile tool for the diagnosis of various retinal diseases. Even with relative ease of use, the images produced sometimes suffer from reflectance artefacts mainly due to the nerve fibre layer (NFL) or camera lens related reflections. We propose a technique that employs multiple fundus images to obtain a single higher quality image without these reflectance artefacts, which also compensates for a suboptimal illumination. The removal of bright artefacts, can have great benefits for the reduction of false positives in the detection of retinal lesions by automatic systems or manual inspectio…
Automated fundus images analysis techniques to screen retinal diseases in diabetic patients
In this Ph.D. thesis, we study new methods to analyse digital fundus images of diabetic patients. In particular, we concentrate on the development of the algorithmic components of an automatic screening system for diabetic retinopathy. The techniques developed can be categorized in: quality assessment and improvement, lesion segmentation and diagnosis. For the first category, we present a fast algorithm to numerically estimate the quality of a single image by employing vasculature and colour-based features; additionally, we show how it is possible to increase the image quality and remove reflection artefacts by merging information gathered in multiple fundus images (which are captured by ch…
Bright Retinal Lesions Detection using Color Fundus Images Containing Reflective Features
Recently, the research community has developed many techniques to detect and diagnose diabetic retinopathy with retinal fundus images. This is a necessary step for the implementation of a large scale screening effort in rural areas where ophthalmologists are not available. In the United States of America, the incidence of diabetes is increasing among the young population. Retina fundus images of patients younger than 20 years old present a high amount of reflectance due to the Nerve Fibre Layer (NFL). Generally, the younger the patient the more the reflectance is visible. We are not aware of algorithms able to explicitly deal with this type of artifact.
Microaneurysms detection with the radon cliff operator in retinal fundus images
ABSTRACT Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of blindness in the industrialized world. Early detection is thekey in providing effective treatment. However, the current number of trained eye care specialists is inadequate to screenthe increasing number of diabetic patients. In recent years, automated and semi-automated systems to detect DR withcolor fundus images have been developedwith encouraging,but not fully satisfactory results. In this study we present theinitial results of a new techniquefor the detection and localization of microaneurysms,an early sign of DR. The algorithmis based on three steps: candidates selection, the actual microaneurysms detection and a Þnal …
Validating retinal fundus image analysis algorithms: issues and a proposal.
This paper concerns the validation of automatic retinal image analysis (ARIA) algorithms. For reasons of space and consistency, we concentrate on the validation of algorithms processing color fundus camera images, currently the largest section of the ARIA literature. We sketch the context (imaging instruments and target tasks) of ARIA validation, summarizing the main image analysis and validation techniques. We then present a list of recommendations focusing on the creation of large repositories of test data created by international consortia, easily accessible via moderated Web sites, including multicenter annotations by multiple experts, specific to clinical tasks, and capable of running …
Retinal vasculature segmentation and measurement framework for color fundus and SLO images
Abstract The change in vascular geometry is an indicator of various health issues linked with vision and cardiovascular risk factors. Early detection and diagnosis of these changes can help patients to select an appropriate treatment option when the disease is in its primary phase. Automatic segmentation and quantification of these vessels would decrease the cost and eliminate inconsistency related to manual grading. However, automatic detection of the vessels is challenging in the presence of retinal pathologies and non-uniform illumination, two common occurrences in clinical settings. This paper presents a novel framework to address the issue of retinal blood vessel detection and width me…
Exudate-based diabetic macular edema detection in fundus images using publicly available datasets
International audience; Diabetic macular edema (DME) is a common vision threatening complication of diabetic retinopathy. In a large scale screening environment DME can be assessed by detecting exudates (a type of bright lesions) in fundus images. In this work, we introduce a new methodology for diagnosis of DME using a novel set of features based on colour, wavelet decomposition and automatic lesion segmentation. These features are employed to train a classifier able to automatically diagnose DME through the presence of exudation. We present a new publicly available dataset with ground-truth data containing 169 patients from various ethnic groups and levels of DME. This and other two publi…
Textureless macula swelling detection with multiple retinal fundus images
Retinal fundus images acquired with nonmydriatic digital fundus cameras are versatile tools for the diagnosis of various retinal diseases. Because of the ease of use of newer camera models and their relatively low cost, these cameras can be employed by operators with limited training for telemedicine or point-of-care (PoC) applications. We propose a novel technique that uses uncalibrated multiple-view fundus images to analyze the swelling of the macula. This innovation enables the detection and quantitative measurement of swollen areas by remote ophthalmologists. This capability is not available with a single image and prone to error with stereo fundus cameras. We also present automatic alg…
Retinal Fundus Multi-Disease Image Dataset (RFMiD): A Dataset for Multi-Disease Detection Research
The world faces difficulties in terms of eye care, including treatment, quality of prevention, vision rehabilitation services, and scarcity of trained eye care experts. Early detection and diagnosis of ocular pathologies would enable forestall of visual impairment. One challenge that limits the adoption of computer-aided diagnosis tool by ophthalmologists is the number of sight-threatening rare pathologies, such as central retinal artery occlusion or anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, and others are usually ignored. In the past two decades, many publicly available datasets of color fundus images have been collected with a primary focus on diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, age-related macular…
Statistical atlas based exudate segmentation
Diabetic macular edema (DME) is characterized by hard exudates. In this article, we propose a novel statistical atlas based method for segmentation of such exudates. Any test fundus image is first warped on the atlas co-ordinate and then a distance map is obtained with the mean atlas image. This leaves behind the candidate lesions. Post-processing schemes are introduced for final segmentation of the exudate. Experiments with the publicly available HEI-MED data-set shows good performance of the method. A lesion localization fraction of 82.5% at 35% of non-lesion localization fraction on the FROC curve is obtained. The method is also compared to few most recent reference methods.
Microaneurysm detection with radon transform-based classification on retina images.
The creation of an automatic diabetic retinopathy screening system using retina cameras is currently receiving considerable interest in the medical imaging community. The detection of microaneurysms is a key element in this effort. In this work, we propose a new microaneurysms segmentation technique based on a novel application of the radon transform, which is able to identify these lesions without any previous knowledge of the retina morphological features and with minimal image preprocessing. The algorithm has been evaluated on the Retinopathy Online Challenge public dataset, and its performance compares with the best current techniques. The performance is particularly good at low false p…
Texture-less Macula Swelling Detection with Multiple Retinal Fundus Images
International audience
Computer-aided detection of cerebral microbleeds in susceptibility-weighted imaging.
Susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI) is recognized as the preferred MRI technique for visualizing cerebral vasculature and related pathologies such as cerebral microbleeds (CMBs). Manual identification of CMBs is time-consuming, has limited reliability and reproducibility, and is prone to misinterpretation. In this paper, a novel computer-aided microbleed detection technique based on machine learning is presented: First, spherical-like objects (potential CMB candidates) with their corresponding bounding boxes were detected using a novel multi-scale Laplacian of Gaussian technique. A set of robust 3-dimensional Radon- and Hessian-based shape descriptors within each bounding box were then ex…
AUTOMATIC RETINA EXUDATES SEGMENTATION WITHOUT A MANUALLY LABELLED TRAINING SET
International audience; Diabetic macular edema (DME) is a common vision threatening complication of diabetic retinopathy. In a large scale screening environment DME can be assessed by detecting exudates (a type of bright lesions) in fundus images. In this work, two new methods for the detection of exudates are presented. The methods do not require a lesion training set so the need to ground-truth data is avoided with significant time savings and independence from human error. We evaluate our algorithm with a new publicly available dataset from various ethnic groups and levels of DME. Also, we compare our results with two recent exudate segmentation algorithms on the same dataset. In all of …