title: Detection of neovascularization in diabetic retinopathy.
abstract: Diabetic retinopathy has become an increasingly important cause of blindness. Nevertheless, vision loss can be prevented from early detection of diabetic retinopathy and monitor with regular examination. Common automatic detection of retinal abnormalities is for microaneurysms, hemorrhages, hard exudates, and cotton wool spot. However, there is a worse case of retinal abnormality, but not much research was done to detect it. It is neovascularization where new blood vessels grow due to extensive lack of oxygen in the retinal capillaries. This paper shows that various combination of techniques such as image normalization, compactness classifier, morphology-based operator, Gaussian filtering, and thresholding techniques were used in developing of neovascularization detection. A function matrix box was added in order to classify the neovascularization from natural blood vessel. A region-based neovascularization classification was attempted as a diagnostic accuracy. The developed method was tested on images from different database sources with varying quality and image resolution. It shows that specificity and sensitivity results were 89.4% and 63.9%, respectively. The proposed approach yield encouraging results for future development.
authors: Faculty of Engineering, University Malaysia Sarawak, Kota Samarahan, Sarawak, Malaysia. sot_04@yahoo.com
authors: Siti Syafinah Ahmad
authors: SS
authors: Hassan
authors: David B L
authors: DB
authors: Bong
authors: Mallika
authors: M
authors: Premsenthil
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003930:Diabetic Retinopathy / Q000473:pathology*; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D009389:Neovascularization, Pathologic / Q000175:diagnosis*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated; D012372:ROC Curve; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity