A new unified framework for the early detection of the progression to diabetic retinopathy from fundus images

Georgios Leontidis* (Corresponding Author), Bashir Al-Diri, Andrew Hunter

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

31 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Human retina is a diverse and important tissue, vastly studied for various retinal and other diseases. Diabetic retinopathy (DR), a leading cause of blindness, is one of them. This work proposes a novel and complete framework for the accurate and robust extraction and analysis of a series of retinal vascular geometric features. It focuses on studying the registered bifurcations in successive years of progression from diabetes (no DR) to DR, in order to identify the vascular alterations. Retinal fundus images are utilised, and multiple experimental designs are employed. The framework includes various steps, such as image registration and segmentation, extraction of features, statistical analysis and classification models. Linear mixed models are utilised for making the statistical inferences, alongside the elastic-net logistic regression, boruta algorithm, and regularised random forests for the feature selection and classification phases, in order to evaluate the discriminative potential of the investigated features and also build classification models. A number of geometric features, such as the central retinal artery and vein equivalents, are found to differ significantly across the experiments and also have good discriminative potential. The classification systems yield promising results with the area under the curve values ranging from 0.821 to 0.968, across the four different investigated combinations.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)98-115
Number of pages18
JournalComputers in Biology and Medicine
Volume90
Early online date15 Sept 2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2017

Bibliographical note

This research project was partly supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant from the European Commission in the framework of the REVAMMAD ITN (Initial Training Research network), Project number 316990.

Keywords

  • Framework
  • Diabetic retinopathy
  • Statistical analysis
  • Detection
  • Classification

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