IMAGE ANALYSIS

FOR RETINOPATHY OF PREMATURITY DIAGNOSIS

As a Major Project for B. Tech degree

Submitted By:
Shreyas S Hanchinal - 08EC73 Kishore Subramaian B - 08EC29 Preetham N - 08EC39

Under the guidance of:

Ms. APARNA

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY KARNATAKA SURATHKAL, MANGALORE 575025
SEPTMEMBER - 02

Objectives To develop a retinal image processing algorithm through which even a non ophthalmologist can identify various stages of Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP).

Motivation Clinical diagnosis is based solely on the appearance of disease in the retina. ROP continues to be leading cause of childhood blindness throughout the world. ROP diagnosis using simple interpretation of images captured using retinal cameras may be feasible. Even though a retcam images can be taken by a non ophthalmologist, it is difficult for them to interpret different stages of ROP.

Background The blood vessels of the retina begin to develop 3 months after conception and complete their development at the time of normal birth. If the infant is born very prematurely, eye development can be disrupted. Blood vessel development occurs from optic nerve in the back of the eye towards the periphery. The vessels may stop growing or grow abnormally from the retina into the normally clear gel that fills the back of the eye. The vessels are fragile and can leak, causing bleeding in the eye. Scar tissue may develop and pull the retina loose from the inner surface of the eye. In several cases this can result in vision loss.The treatment for ROP usually starts when the infant is about 4 to 6 weeks of age. Since the very premature infants are at the highest risk of developing ROP, the condition may become more common again. There are 5 stages of ROP Stage I: There is mildly abnormal blood vessel growth. Stage II: blood vessel growth is moderately abnormal. Stage III: Blood vessel growth is severely abnormal. Stage IV: Blood vessel growth is severely abnormal and there is partial detached retina. Stage V: There is total retinal detachment.

Method An ophthalmologist, who specializes in either retinal disorders, uses indirect ophthalmoscope through which he views the back of the eye to analyze the retinal blood vessels to determine whether development of ROP is occurred or not.

The ROP process starts with the acquisition of the retcam image of the patient. The image is enhanced and the made free from noise. The image obtained is segmented to obtain the required part and analyzed to know the present stage of ROP. By using the image processing it is easy to interrupt the stage of ROP accurately.

Techniques Proposed

1. Histogram Equalization: The intensity-spreading of the Retcam image is performed. This is done for better detection of fragment size distribution. Contrast is increased in this process. This image is better to analyse than the original image. Histogram is a non-linear mapping process whereby white and black are not assigned equal weight. Brighter intensities are better spread in histogram equalization. Since it is well mapped to the properties of human vision, its performance can be very convincing for ROP image.
2. Thresholding: The object and the background have different range of intensities.

Thersholding involves separation of background and foreground in the image. Here segmentation of image features is done. For example from grayscale to binary scale. We will be implementing this with the help of Otsus method. An optimum threshold is
selected which separates the object clearly.

3. Averaging Filter: The averaging filter mainly reduces noise. This acts as a low pass filter. This is a better preprocessing step for ROP images. The disadvantage of averaging is that it causes blurring which reduces detail of the image. The averaging process is actually a statistical operator since it aims to estimate the mean of a local neighborhood. The error in the process is naturally high, for N samples; the statistical error is of the order of:

4. Gaussian Averaging Filter: This is mainly to smoothen the image.The Gaussian functions is according to the equation ( ) Gaussian filter retains most of the image than the normal filter which helps to have a better ROP image as most of the features are retained while the noise is removed.
5.
( )

Median Filter: Removal of noise requires this filter. This is a preprocessing step to
improve edge detection and feature extraction. This filter removes effectively the salt and pepper noise. This does not remove or disturb the edges while removing noise.

6. Edge detection and Feature extraction using spacek operator: This is a one dimensional optimal noise smoothening filter. This will be used for edge detection and measuring curvature by changes in intensity. This does better noise removal than Gaussian filter.

Histogram equalization

Thresholding

Averaging Filter

Gaussian averaging Filter

Median Filter

Spacek operator

Method of Implementation Algorithm will be developed and implemented in MATLAB. It will coded in open CV to be burnt on board.

Reference: 1. Detection of Blood Vessels in Retinal Images using 2-D matched Filters IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging Vol 8 No. 3 Sept 1989 2. A Novel Image Processing Approach for Retinopathy of Prematurity Stage Screening European Journal of Science Research Vol 55 No.3 (2011) 3. Parsons Disease of the Eye 4. On the optimal edge detector, (M. Petrov and J.Kittler)