Image Understanding for Automated Retinal Diagnosis

摘要

Interpretation of images of the ocular fundus by the STARE (STructured Analysis of the REtina) system requires many steps, including image enhancement, object segmentation, object identification, and scene analysis. We describe how these steps are performed and linked, and we demonstrate some success with the STARE system in each of these steps. We are currently able to segment the blood vessels, optic nerve, fovea, bright lesions, and dark lesions automatically. We describe the methods for these tasks and the development underway to complete the production of a database of objects that forms a coded description of the image. For the final step in interpreting the image, we found the backpropagation neural network to be able to learn to diagnose a set of diseases from the type of information in the coded description of the image.