Automatic differentiation of color fundus images containing drusen or exudates using a contextual spatial pyramid approach

M. van Grinsven, T. Theelen, L. Witkamp, J. van der Heijden, J. van de Ven, C. Hoyng, B. van Ginneken and C. Sánchez

Biomedical Optics Express 2016;7(3):709-725.

DOI PMID Cited by ~10

We developed an automatic system to identify and differentiate color fundus images containing no lesions, drusen or exudates. Drusen and exudates are lesions with a bright appearance, associated with age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, respectively. The system consists of three lesion detectors operating at pixel-level, combining their outputs using spatial pooling and classification with a random forest classifier. System performance was compared with ratings of two independent human observers using human-expert annotations as reference. Kappa agreements of 0.89, 0.97 and 0.92 and accuracies of 0.93, 0.98 and 0.95 were obtained for the system and observers, respectively.