Automatic exudates detection in retinal images using efficient integrated approaches

Diabetic Retinopathy with exudates causes a major problem in human visualization and becomes a cause of blindness to diabetic patients. In addition, the numbers of diabetic retinopathy patients are increasing while the numbers of doctors are not easily increased in the same proportion. This circumstance causes a heavy work load for doctors. In the past, the medical image processing research has shown that simply getting a second opinion can significantly help physician's diagnosis. This research proposes a method to detect exudates from diabetic retinopathy images. The early exudates detection of diabetic retinopathy patients will reduce seriousness in diabetic retinopathy. The proposed method for detecting exudates consists of 5 major steps as follows: 1) To improve the quality of images by using the contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) 2) To apply the object attribute thresholding algorithm (OAT) for non-retinal object removal, 3) To implement Frangi's algorithm based on Hessian filtering for blood vessel detection 4) To detect the retinal optic disc by applying the combination between multi-resolution analysis and Hough transform and 5) To classify exudates in the remaining region with algorithms of hierarchical fuzzy-c-mean clustering. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on DIARETDB, which is the retinal image database of the Lappeenranta University of Technology, where the performance is good enough for exudates detection.