Detection of neovascularization in diabetic retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy has become an increasingly important cause of blindness. Nevertheless, vision loss can be prevented from early detection of diabetic retinopathy and monitor with regular examination. Common automatic detection of retinal abnormalities is for microaneurysms, hemorrhages, hard exudates, and cotton wool spot. However, there is a worse case of retinal abnormality, but not much research was done to detect it. It is neovascularization where new blood vessels grow due to extensive lack of oxygen in the retinal capillaries. This paper shows that various combination of techniques such as image normalization, compactness classifier, morpholog y-based operator, Gaussian filtering, and thres holding techniques were used in developing of neovasc ularizati on detection. A function matrix box was added in order to classify the neovasc ularization from na tural blood vessel. A region-based neo-vascul arization classificati on was attempted as a diagnostic accuracy. The develo ped method was tested on images from different database sources with varying quality and image resolution. It shows that specificity and sensitivity results were 89.4% and 63.9%, respectively. The proposed approach yield encouraging results for future development.