Fast and Accurate Mobile-Aided Screening System of Moderate Diabetic Retinopathy

International audienceThe Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a worldwide eye disease that causes visual damages and can leads to blindness. Therefore, the detection of the DR in the early stages is highly recommended. However, a delay is registered for ensuring early DR diagnosis which caused by the low-rate of the ophthalmologists, the deficiency of diagnosis equipment and the lack of mobility of elderly patients. In this paper, the main objective is to provide a mobile-aided screening system of moderate DR. Within this aim, we propose a classifier-based method which is based on detecting the Hard Exudate (HE) lesions that occur in moderate DR stage. A set of features are extracted to ensure an accurate and robust detection with respect to modest quality of fundus images. Moreover, the detection is provided in a low complexity processing to be suitable for mobile device. The aimed system corresponds to the implementation of the method on a smartphone associated to an optical lens for capturing fundus image. The system reached satisfactory screening performance where an accuracy of 98.36%, a sensitivity of 100% and specificity of 96.45% are registered using the DIARETDB1 fundus image databases. Moreover, the screening is performed in an average execution time of 2.68 seconds