TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING 1 An Ensemble-based System for Microaneurysm Detection and Diabetic Retinopathy Grading

Abstract—Reliable microaneurysm detection in digital fundus images is still an open issue in medical image processing. We pro-pose an ensemble-based framework to improve microaneurysm detection. Unlike the well-known approach of considering the output of multiple classifiers, we propose a combination of internal components of microaneurysm detectors, namely prepro-cessing methods and candidate extractors. We have evaluated our approach for microaneurysm detection in an online competition, where this algorithm is currently ranked as first and also on two other databases. Since microaneurysm detection is decisive in diabetic retinopathy grading, we also tested the proposed method for this task on the publicly available Messidor database, where a promising AUC 0.90 with 0.01 uncertainty is achieved in a ’DR/non-DR’-type classification based on the presence or absence of the microaneurysms. Index Terms—Microaneurysm detection, Ensemble-based sys-tems, Diabetic retinopathy grading, Fundus image processing