• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.119-128
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• 2014

The appearance of retinal blood vessels is an important diagnostic indicator of serious disease, such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. Automatic segmentation of the retinal vasculature is a primary step towards automatic assessment of the retinal blood vessel features. This paper presents an automated method for the enhancement and segmentation of blood vessels in fundus images. To decrease the influence of the optic disk, and emphasize the vessels for each retinal image, a multidirectional morphological top-hat transform with rotating structuring elements is first applied to the background homogenized retinal image. Then, an improved multiscale line detector is presented to produce a vessel response image, and yield the retinal blood vessel tree for each retinal image. Since different line detectors at varying scales have different line responses in the multiscale detector, the line detectors with longer length produce more vessel responses than the ones with shorter length; the improved multiscale detector combines all the responses at different scales by setting different weights for each scale. The methodology is evaluated on two publicly available databases, DRIVE and STARE. Experimental results demonstrate an excellent performance that approximates the average accuracy of a human observer. Moreover, the method is simple, fast, and robust to noise, so it is suitable for being integrated into a computer-assisted diagnostic system for ophthalmic disorders.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.27-32
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• 2006

We present an effective algorithm for automatic tracing of retinal vessel structure and vascular landmark extraction of bifurcations and ending points. In this paper we deal with vascular patterns from RGB images for personal identification. Vessel tracing algorithms are of interest in a variety of biometric and medical application such as personal identification, biometrics, and ophthalmic disorders like vessel change detection. However eye surface vasculature tracing in RGB images has many problems which are subject to improper illumination, glare, fade-out, shadow and artifacts arising from reflection, refraction, and dispersion. The proposed algorithm on vascular tracing employs multi-stage processing of ten-layers as followings: Image Acquisition, Image Enhancement by gray scale retinal image enhancement, reducing background artifact and illuminations and removing interlacing minute characteristics of vessels, Vascular Structure Extraction by connecting broken vessels, extracting vascular structure using eight directional information, and extracting retinal vascular structure, and Vascular Landmark Extraction by extracting bifurcations and ending points. The results of automatic retinal vessel extraction using jive different thresholds applied 34 eye images are presented. The results of vasculature tracing algorithm shows that the suggested algorithm can obtain not only robust and accurate vessel tracing but also vascular landmarks according to thresholds.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.11
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• pp.2702-2719
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• 2013

A new optimal scheme based on curvelet transform is proposed for retinal image enhancement (RIE) using real-coded quantum genetic algorithm. Curvelet transform has better performance in representing edges than classical wavelet transform for its anisotropy and directional decomposition capabilities. For more precise reconstruction and better visualization, curvelet coefficients in corresponding subbands are modified by using a nonlinear enhancement mapping function. An automatic method is presented for selecting optimal parameter settings of the nonlinear mapping function via quantum genetic search strategy. The performance measures used in this paper provide some quantitative comparison among different RIE methods. The proposed method is tested on the DRIVE and STARE retinal databases and compared with some popular image enhancement methods. The experimental results demonstrate that proposed method can provide superior enhanced retinal image in terms of several image quantitative evaluation indexes.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2021.05a
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• pp.614-616
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• 2021

The world faces difficulties in terms of eye care, including treatment, quality of prevention, vision rehabilitation services, and scarcity of trained eye care experts. However, it is difficult to develop a method for classifying various ocular diseases because the existing dataset for retinal image disclosure does not consist of various diseases found in clinical practice. We propose a method for classifying ocular diseases using the Retinal Fundus Multi-disease Image Dataset (RFMiD), a dataset published in the ISBI-2021 challenge. Our goal is to develop a robust and generalizable model for screening retinal images into normal and abnormal categories. The performance of the proposed model shows a value of 0.9782 for the test dataset as an area under the curve (AUC) score.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.202-210
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• 2002

During the last few years, the extraction and reconstruction of the blood vessels in the medical image has been actively researched and the analysis for the retinal vessel structure has provided important information for diagnosis and remedy of the retinopathy patients. In this research, we propose the algorithm that tracks automatically the entire retinal vessel in retinal image acquired by the ICG(IndoCyanine Green) technology. This algorithm extracts contours and centers by estimating the local maxima and processing directions and detects bifurcations and junctions by comparing direction components of the local maxima from the gradient magnitude profile of each blood vessel. We present experimental results that the entire blood vessel is automatically reconstructed and is excellent in accuracy and connectivity after applying our algorithm to the ICG retinal images of patients.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.373-383
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• 2015

This paper proposes a decision support system to recognizing retinal diseases. This paper uses a smartphone platform and cloud computing as the base of the system. A microscopic lens is attached int' the smartphone camera to capture the user retinal image for recognizing the user's retinal condition. An application is assembled in computer and then installed in to the smartphone. The application role is to connect between the system in smartphone and system in cloud, the application will send the retinal image to the cloud system to be classified. The paper uses OCFE (optimized classifier based on feature elimination) algorithm as the classifier. The retinal image is trained using combination of two ophthalmology databases DIARETDB1 v2.1 and STARE. Therefore, this system average accuracy is 88%, while the average error rate is 12%.

• Journal of Korean Ophthalmic Optics Society
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.21-23
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• 2002

Compared visual acuity that is measured in a artificial myopia with the numerical calculation. Calculation included image's height as well as blur circle that is formed to retina. The blur circle calculated in geometrical optics model, and height of retinal image calculated by refractive power and visual acuity that is measured in a artificial myopia. Define this result as "blur ratio" about blur circle and height of retinal image, and investigated blur ratio relationship about visual acuity in a artificial myopia.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Computer Information Conference
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• 2019.01a
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• pp.397-398
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• 2019

망막혈관 영상에서(retinal image) 혈관의 모양 또는 생성변화를 효과적으로 검진하기 위해서 망막혈관을 자동적으로 분리하는 영상분할 기법의 개발은 매우 중요한 사안이다. 이를 위해서 주로 망막혈관영상의 잡음을 억제하고 또한 혈관의 명암대비도(contrast)를 증가시키는 전처리 과정을 거쳐서 혈관의 국부적인 화소값의 변화, 방향성을 판별하여 혈관을 자동적으로 검출하는 방법들이 제시되어왔으며 최근에는 합성곱 신경망(CNN) 딥러닝 학습모델을 활용한 망막혈관 분리 알고리즘들이 제시되고 있다.

• Korean Journal of Veterinary Research
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.137-141
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• 2013

To report retinal image of in a 6-year-old male castrated poodle dog with a 2-month history of nyctalopia using optical coherence tomography (OCT). Ocular reflexes were present in both eyes and slit lamp examination showed anterior subscapular cataract in the right eye. There were fundus abnormalities in both eyes similar to retinal degeneration. Scotopic electroretinograms (ERGs) revealed significantly subabnormal amplitudes and prolonged implicit time, whereas photopic ERGs were better maintained, although far from normal. OCT of affected dogs revealed generalized retinal thinning much more than a normal age-matched dog. Therefore, OCT scanning is considered to be a useful method for retinal evaluation in dogs with retinal degeneration.

• Journal of Korean Medical Science
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• v.33 no.43
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• pp.239.1-239.12
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• 2018

Background: We described a novel multi-step retinal fundus image reading system for providing high-quality large data for machine learning algorithms, and assessed the grader variability in the large-scale dataset generated with this system. Methods: A 5-step retinal fundus image reading tool was developed that rates image quality, presence of abnormality, findings with location information, diagnoses, and clinical significance. Each image was evaluated by 3 different graders. Agreements among graders for each decision were evaluated. Results: The 234,242 readings of 79,458 images were collected from 55 licensed ophthalmologists during 6 months. The 34,364 images were graded as abnormal by at-least one rater. Of these, all three raters agreed in 46.6% in abnormality, while 69.9% of the images were rated as abnormal by two or more raters. Agreement rate of at-least two raters on a certain finding was 26.7%-65.2%, and complete agreement rate of all-three raters was 5.7%-43.3%. As for diagnoses, agreement of at-least two raters was 35.6%-65.6%, and complete agreement rate was 11.0%-40.0%. Agreement of findings and diagnoses were higher when restricted to images with prior complete agreement on abnormality. Retinal/glaucoma specialists showed higher agreements on findings and diagnoses of their corresponding subspecialties. Conclusion: This novel reading tool for retinal fundus images generated a large-scale dataset with high level of information, which can be utilized in future development of machine learning-based algorithms for automated identification of abnormal conditions and clinical decision supporting system. These results emphasize the importance of addressing grader variability in algorithm developments.