Leak detection optimisation on retina fluorescein angiography images using phase stretch transform for malaria retinopathy

Abstract

Malarial Retinopathy (MR) is indicated by retina alteration such as white dots occurrence which is caused by malaria. Leak detection is a key factor of MR’s early diagnosis.  Inconsistent size and shape of the leakages with the colour contrast that relatively similar with the background. Leak detection’s algorithm is one of the most complex algorithms on the fundus image analysis field. Therefore, improving performance in the leakage detection is essential. This study focuses on automated leakage detection on fluorescein angiography (FA) images. The methods used in this study are vessel segmentation, saliency detection, phase stretch transform (PST), optic disk removal and leak detection to extract some features which then classified to correctly validate the leak. From 20 patient data large focal leak images with 31 leak points, 28 of them have been correctly detected. So, the experiment produced the accuracy and specificity of 0.98 and 0.9, respectively. With the proposed method of this study, there is a potential to enhance the knowledge on MR field in the future.