Automatic differentiation of color fundus images containing drusen or exudates using a contextual spatial pyramid approach

Biomed Opt Express. 2016 Feb 2;7(3):709-25. doi: 10.1364/BOE.7.000709. eCollection 2016 Mar 1.

Abstract

We developed an automatic system to identify and differentiate color fundus images containing no lesions, drusen or exudates. Drusen and exudates are lesions with a bright appearance, associated with age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, respectively. The system consists of three lesion detectors operating at pixel-level, combining their outputs using spatial pooling and classification with a random forest classifier. System performance was compared with ratings of two independent human observers using human-expert annotations as reference. Kappa agreements of 0.89, 0.97 and 0.92 and accuracies of 0.93, 0.98 and 0.95 were obtained for the system and observers, respectively.

Keywords: (100.0100) Image processing; (100.2960) Image analysis; (100.5010) Pattern recognition.