Designing a Diagnostic System of Patients Suspected with Glaucoma Using Retinal Fundus Images

Introduction: Glaucoma is one of eye diseases and is a group of disorders that cause damages to optic nerve. If it does not cure; it can lead to permanent vision loss. There is no sign and pain for this disease and it appears in form of blindness in very advanced phase of its progression. Digital imaging is a useful tool for non-invasive measurements in medical field. By using image processing techniques, many medical images could be processed and analyzed, helping experts to detect diseases, decreasing cost and time of tests and helping to do screening significantly. The main purpose of this study was to suggest an algorithm in order to detect glaucoma suspects in retinal fundus images. Material and Methods: This study was an original applied study and its algorithm was developed in MATLAB environment using image processing toolbox. It was evaluated by using existed images obtained from RIM-ONE database. In the present paper, Otsu multi-level thresholding algorithm was used along with MICO algorithm to segment the optic cup and disc and estimate their vertical diameter. Results: The algorithm was run on 124 images containing 57 images of glaucoma suspects and 67 images of healthy retina. The sensitivity and specificity were 0.93 and 0.90 respectively. Conclusion: Suggested algorithm worked fast because light pre-processing has been done. However, there is no system with 100% correct diagnosis, the results obtained from suggested system was acceptable. Thus using such systems could be helpful for practitioners.