Automatic detection of retinal lesions for screening of diabetic retinopathy

摘要: Objective Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is characterized by the progressive deterioration of retina with the appearance of different types of lesions that include micro-aneurysms, hemorrhages, exudates, etc. Detection of these lesions plays a significant role for early diagnosis of DR. Methods To this aim, this paper proposes a novel and automated lesion detection scheme, which consists of the four main steps: vessel extraction and optic disc removal, preprocessing, candidate lesion detection, and postprocessing. The optic disc and the blood vessels are suppressed first to facilitate further processing. Curvelet-based edge enhancement is done to separate out the dark lesions from the poorly illuminated retinal background, while the contrast between the bright lesions and the background is enhanced through an optimally designed wideband bandpass filter. The mutual information of the maximum matched filter response …