Computer-aided diagnostic detection system of venous beading in retinal images

The detection of venous beading in retinal images provides an early sign of diabetic retinopathy and plays an important role as a preprocessing step i n diagnosing ocular diseases. We present a computer-aided diagnostic system to automatically detect venous beading of blood vessels. It comprises of t wo modules, referred to as the blood vessel extraction module (BVEM) and th e venus beading detection module (VBDM). The former uses a bell-shaped Gaus sian kernel with 12 azimuths to extract blood vessels while the latter appl ies a neural network-based shape cognitron to detect venous beading among t he extracted blood vessels for diagnosis. Both modules are fully computer-a utomated. To evaluate the proposed system, 61 retinal images (32 beaded and 29 normal images) are used for performance evaluation. (C) 2000 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.