title: Computer aided quantification for retinal lesions in patients with moderate and severe non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy: a retrospective cohort study.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Detection of retinal lesions like micro-aneurysms and exudates are important for the clinical diagnosis of diabetes retinopathy. The traditional subjective judgments by clinicians are dependent on their experience and can be subject to lack of consistency and therefore a quantification method is worthwhile.
  
  
  METHODS
  In this study, 10 moderate non-proliferative diabetes retinopathy (NPDR) patients and 10 severe NPDR ones were retrospectively selected as a cohort. Mathematical morphological methods were used for automatic segmentation of lesions. For exudates detection, images were pre-processed with adaptive histogram equalization to enhance contrast, then binary images for area calculation were obtained by threshold classification. For micro-aneurysms detection, the images were pre-processed by top-hat and bottom-hat transformation, then Otsu method and Hough transform were used to classify micro-aneurysms. Post-processing morphological methods were used to preclude the false positive noise.
  
  
  RESULTS
  After segmentation, the area of exuduates divided by optic disk area (exudates/disk ratio) and counts of microaneurysms were quantified and compared between the moderate and severe non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy groups, which had significant difference(P < 0.05).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  In conclusion, morphological features of lesion might be an image marker for NPDR grading and computer aided quantification of retinal lesion could be a practical way for clinicians to better investigates diabetic retinopathy.
authors.forename: Huiqun
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Xiaofeng
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Xingyun
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Geng
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Informatics, Medical School of Nantong University, Nantong 226001, China. dongjc@ntu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Jiancheng
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Dong
authors.forename: Guomin
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Zhou
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000783:Aneurysm / Q000175:diagnosis*; D015331:Cohort Studies; D003930:Diabetic Retinopathy / Q000175:diagnosis*; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted; D005122:Exudates and Transudates; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012171:Retinal Vessels / Q000473:pathology*; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D058471:Subretinal Fluid