Retinal Vessel Detection in Retinopathy of Prematurity Using Butterworth High-pass Filters and SVM

Abstract — Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is an eye disease in premature infants. It mostly happens in babies weighing less than 0011 g and gestational age less than 10 weeks. The growth of retinal vessels are interrupted in premature infants and the retina has been unable to get enough oxygen and food. So, the delay in diagnosis may lead to blindness. Therefore it is necessary to follow the premature infants in regular checkups to assure that their vessel structure is growing normal. In this paper a high pass filter is used to track the retinal vessels and the energy criterion is computed for finding the percentage of area which is covered with blood vessels. The algorithm has been applied on 011 images including both mature and premature infants. The pictures are taken with a Retcam and labeled by an ophthalmologist. The result of this study was compared with ophthalmologist’s hand labels of diagnosis and it can detect the prematurity with a high specificity of 0111, sensitivity of %29.61 and accuracy of %59101. Index Terms—Butterworth high-pass filter, ROP, SVM. I