Analysis of retinal fundus images is essential for physicians, optometrists and ophthalmologists in the diagnosis, care and treatment of patients. The first step of almost all forms of automated fundus analysis begins with the segmentation and subtraction of the retinal vasculature, while analysis of that same structure can aid in the diagnosis of certain retinal and cardiovascular conditions, such as diabetes or stroke. This paper investigates the use of a Convolutional Neural Network as a multi-channel classifier of retinal vessels using DRIVE, a database of fundus images. The result of the network with the application of a confidence threshold was slightly below the 2nd observer and gold standard, with an accuracy of 0.9419 and ROC of 0.9707. The output of the network with on post-processing boasted the highest sensitivity found in the literature with a score of 0.9568 and a good ROC score of 0.9689. The high sensitivity of the system makes it suitable for longitudinal morphology assessments, disease detection and other similar tasks.
The segmentation of retinal morphology has numerous applications in assessing ophthalmologic and cardiovascular disease pathologies. The early detection of many such conditions is often the most effective method for reducing patient risk. Computer aided segmentation of the vasculature has proven to be a challenge, mainly due to inconsistencies such as noise, variations in hue and brightness that can greatly reduce the quality of fundus images. Accurate fundus and/or retinal vessel maps give rise to longitudinal studies able to utilize multimodal image registration and disease/condition status measurements, as well as applications in surgery preparation and biometrics. This paper further investigates the use of a Convolutional Neural Network as a multi-channel classifier of retinal vessels using the Digital Retinal Images for Vessel Extraction database, a standardized set of fundus images used to gauge the effectiveness of classification algorithms. The CNN has a feed-forward architecture and varies from other published architectures in its combination of: max-pooling, zero-padding, ReLU layers, batch normalization, two dense layers and finally a Softmax activation function. Notably, the use of Adam to optimize training the CNN on retinal fundus images has not been found in prior review. This work builds on prior work of the authors, exploring the use of Gabor filters to boost the accuracy of the system to 0.9478 during post processing. The mean of a series of Gabor filters with varying frequencies and sigma values are applied to the output of the network and used to determine whether a pixel represents a vessel or non-vessel.
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