Diabetic retinopathy detection through novel tetragonal local octa patterns and extreme learning machines

Abstract

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is an eye disease that victimize the people suffering from diabetes from many years. The severe form of DR results in form of the blindness that can initially be controlled by the DR-screening oriented treatment. The effective screening programs require the trained human resource that manually grade the fundus images to understand the severity of the disease. But due to the complexity of this process, and the insufficient number of the trained workers, the precise manual grading is an expensive process. The CAD-based solutions try to address these limitations but most of the existing DR detection systems are as evaluated over small sets and become ineffective when applied in real scenarios. Therefore, in this paper we proposed a novel technique to precisely detect the various stages of the DR by extending the research of the content-based image retrieval domain. To achieve the human-level performance over the large-scale DR-datasets (i.e. Kaggle-DR), the fundus images are represented by the novel tetragonal local octa pattern (T-LOP) features, that are then classified through the extreme learning machine (ELM). To justify the significance of the method, the proposed scheme is compared against several state-of-the-art methods including the deep learning-based methods over four DR-datasets of variational lengths (i.e. Kaggle-DR, DRIVE, Review-DB, STARE). The experimental results confirm the significance of the DR-detection scheme to serve as a stand-alone solution for providing the precise information of the severity of the DR in an efficient manner.

Keywords: Content based image retrieval; Diabetic retinopathy; Extreme learning machines; Tetragonal local octa patterns.