International Journal of Biomedical Imaging 
Volume 2006 (2006), Article ID 45806, 8 pages
doi:10.1155/IJBI/2006/45806

A Decision Support Framework for Automated Screening of Diabetic Retinopathy

P. Kahai,1 K. R. Namuduri,1 and H. Thompson2

 1Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Wichita State University, Wichita 67260-0044, KS, USA
2LSU Eye Center, Louisiana State University, New Orleans 70112, LA, USA
Received 8 August 2005; Accepted 8 October 2005

Recommended by Jie Tian

Abstract

The early signs of diabetic retinopathy (DR) are depicted by microaneurysms among other signs. A prompt diagnosis when the disease is at the early stage can help prevent irreversible damages to the diabetic eye. In this paper, we propose a decision support system (DSS) for automated screening of early signs of diabetic retinopathy. Classification schemes for deducing the presence or absence of DR are developed and tested. The detection rule is based on binary-hypothesis testing problem which simplifies the problem to yes/no decisions. An analysis of the performance of the Bayes optimality criteria applied to DR is also presented. The proposed DSS is evaluated on the real-world data. The results suggest that by biasing the classifier towards DR detection, it is possible to make the classifier achieve good sensitivity.