Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a diabetes complication that affects the eye and can cause damage from mild vision problems to complete blindness. It has been observed that the eye fundus images show various kinds of color aberrations and irrelevant illuminations, which degrade the diagnostic analysis and may hinder the results. In this research, we present a methodology to eliminate these unnecessary reflectance properties of the images using a novel image processing schema and a stacked deep learning technique for the diagnosis. For the luminosity normalization of the image, the gray world color constancy algorithm is implemented which does image desaturation and improves the overall image quality. The effectiveness of the proposed image enhancement technique is evaluated based on the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and mean squared error (MSE) of the normalized image. To develop a deep learning based computer-aided diagnostic system, we present a novel methodology of stacked generalization of convolution neural networks (CNN). Three custom CNN model weights are fed on the top of a single meta-learner classifier, which combines the most optimum weights of the three sub-neural networks to obtain superior metrics of evaluation and robust prediction results. The proposed stacked model reports an overall test accuracy of 97.92% (binary classification) and 87.45% (multi-class classification). Extensive experimental results in terms of accuracy, F-measure, sensitivity, specificity, recall and precision reveal that the proposed methodology of illumination normalization greatly facilitated the deep learning model and yields better results than various state-of-art techniques.

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Diabetic Retinopathy Diagnosis From Fundus Images Using Stacked Generalization of Deep Models

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a fast-spreading disease across the globe, which is caused by diabetes. The DR may lead the diabetic patients to complete vision loss. In this scenario, early identification of DR is more essential to recover the eyesight and provide help for timely treatment. The detection of DR can be manually performed by ophthalmologists and can also be done by an automated system. In the manual system, analysis and explanation of retinal fundus images need ophthalmologists, which is a time-consuming and very expensive task, but in the automated system, artificial intelligence is used to perform an imperative role in the area of ophthalmology and specifically in the early detection of diabetic retinopathy over the traditional detection approaches. Recently, numerous advanced studies related to the identification of DR have been reported. This paper presents a detailed review of the detection of DR with three major aspects; retinal datasets, DR detection methods, and performance evaluation metrics. Furthermore, this study also covers the author’s observations and provides future directions in the field of diabetic retinopathy to overcome the research challenges for the research community.

Automatic Detection of Diabetic Retinopathy: A Review on Datasets, Methods and Evaluation Metrics

A hybrid feature preservation technique based on luminosity and edge based contrast enhancement in color fundus images

A comprehensive diagnosis system for early signs and different diabetic retinopathy grades using fundus retinal images based on pathological changes detection

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a disease facilitated by the rapid spread of diabetes worldwide. DR can blind diabetic individuals. Early detection of DR is essential to restoring vision and providing timely treatment. DR can be detected manually by an ophthalmologist, examining the retinal and fundus images to analyze the macula, morphological changes in blood vessels, hemorrhage, exudates, and/or microaneurysms. This is a time consuming, costly, and challenging task. An automated system can easily perform this function by using artificial intelligence, especially in screening for early DR. Recently, much state-of-the-art research relevant to the identification of DR has been reported. This article describes the current methods of detecting non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy, exudates, hemorrhage, and microaneurysms. In addition, the authors point out future directions in overcoming current challenges in the field of DR research.

Survey on recent developments in automatic detection of diabetic retinopathy.

The morphology of blood vessels in retinal fundus images is an important indicator of diseases like glaucoma, hypertension and diabetic retinopathy. The accuracy of retinal blood vessels segmentation affects the quality of retinal image analysis which is used in diagnosis methods in modern ophthalmology. Contrast enhancement is one of the crucial steps in any of retinal blood vessel segmentation approaches. The reliability of the segmentation depends on the consistency of the contrast over the image. This paper presents an assessment of the suitability of a recently invented spatially adaptive contrast enhancement technique for enhancing retinal fundus images for blood vessel segmentation. The enhancement technique was integrated with a variant of Tyler Coye algorithm, which has been improved with Hough line transformation based vessel reconstruction method. The proposed approach was evaluated on two public datasets STARE and DRIVE. The assessment was done by comparing the segmentation performance with five widely used contrast enhancement techniques based on wavelet transform, contrast limited histogram equalization, local normalization, linear un-sharp masking and contourlet transform. The results revealed that the assessed enhancement technique is well suited for the application and also outperforms all compared techniques.

P. W. G. R. M. P. B. Giragama

Papers

A retinal image enhancement technique for blood vessel segmentation algorithm

A Retinal Image Enhancement Technique for Blood Vessel Segmentation Algorithm