Automated Microaneurysms Detection in Retinal Images Using Radon Transform and Supervised Learning: Application to Mass Screening of Diabetic Retinopathy

Detection of red lesions in color retinal images is a critical step to prevent the development of vision loss and blindness associated with diabetic retinopathy (DR). Microaneurysms (MAs) are the most frequently observed and are usually the first lesions to appear as a consequence of DR. Therefore, their detection is necessary for mass screening of DR. However, detecting these lesions is a challenging task because of the low image contrast, and the wide variation of imaging conditions. Recently, the emergence of computer-aided diagnosis systems offers promising approaches to detect these lesions for diagnostic purposes. In this paper we focus on developing unsupervised and supervised techniques to cope intelligently with the MAs detection problem. In the first step, the retinal images are preprocessed to remove background variation in order to achieve a high level of accuracy in the detection. In the main processing step, important landmarks such as the optic nerve head and retinal vessels are detected and masked using the Radon transform (RT) and multi-overlapping windows. Finally, the MAs are detected and numbered by using a combination of RT and a supervised support vector machine classifier. The method was tested on three publicly available datasets and a local database comprising a total of 749 images. Detection performance was evaluated using sensitivity, specificity, and FROC analysis. From the image analysis viewpoint, DR was detected with a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 93% on average across all of these databases. Moreover, from lesion-based analysis the proposed approach detected the MAs with sensitivity of 95.7% with an average of 7 false positives per image. These results compare favourably with the best of the published results to date.

Automated summary

Detection of red lesions in color retinal images is crucial for preventing vision loss and blindness in diabetic retinopathy. Microaneurysms (MAs) are the most common lesions associated with DR and their detection is challenging due to low image contrast and variable imaging conditions. This study developed unsupervised and supervised techniques to intelligently address the MAs detection problem, achieving high sensitivity and specificity in detecting DR lesions.