Automated detection of blood vessel structures is becoming of crucial interest for

better management of vascular disease. As blood vessels can be seen as linear

structures distributed at different orientations and scales in an image, various
kernels (or enhancement filters) have been proposed to enhance them in order to
ease the segmentation problem. This work concentrates on providing a solution for
vessel segmentation, classification and localization of abnormal regions in the
retinal images. Deep learning methods are employed for vessel segmentation which is
further extended to classify the type of the image. The localization of the
abnormal regions is detected using edge detection and contour models.

The presence of the Diabetic retinopathy introduces changes in terms of many

aspects. The initial changes in the Diabetic retinopathy are as follows
(1) Micro aneurysms
(2) Hemorrhages
(3) Hard exudates
(4) Soft exudates
(5) Cotton wool spots
(6) Intra retinal micro vascular

Objectives
Automated screening programs are necessary inaddressing this problem when working
to eradicate preventable vision loss.The main challenge in developing an expert
system for this purposeis the automatic and reliable extraction of the normal
features from theretinal imagery. The temporal registration of retinal images
provides animportant groundwork for healthcare experts to monitor the progress
ofvarious ailments. Retinal image registration also requires accurateidentification
and extraction of the important landmark features in fundusimages. An attempt is
made in this work to develop novel and reliablealgorithms for the localization and
extraction of important normal features ofthe retina.

The following are the objectives that were dealt in this work
1. To propose an efficient blood vessel extraction approach with image processing
method
2. To implement and extend the vessel extraction with deep learning methods
3. To classify the abnormal retinal images with machine learning and deep learning
methods.
4. Propose a method to extract and localize the exudates regions in the retinal
images.
5. Implement and validate the approach with multiple standard retina image
datasets

The work presented in this paper concentrates on contrast adjustment and vessel
segmentation

The objective of blood vessel segmentation algorithm is to extract the vessels

automatically and accurately to analyze the changes in it precisely. With this
automation, cost and time involved in grading can be reduced and also the
inconsistency that may arise during manual grading can be minimized [15]. The
vessel tree segmentation is a challenging and crucial task because of the presence
of low contrast and correlated geometrical orientations in the background. The
automatic segmentation depends on image quality, application fields; semi automated
and automated approach and other external factors. Several methods have been
proposed so far in the literature for the extraction of vessel tree and most of
them yield low sensitivity and accuracy ratio leading to a scope for new methods
The proposed vessel tree segmentation can be summarized as shown in figure 2
The vessel extraction/ segmentation is performed with customized deep networks
where a series of convolutional networks with appropriate softmax and
classification layers are employed to perform the operation. In this work we also
try to propose a new cost function /loss function at the softmax layer. Later,
image processing methods are used to locate the exudates that were present in the
abnormal retinal images.

Datasets: The algorithm will be tested on DRIVE [16], STARE [17], CHASE[18] and
DIARETDB1 datasets for classification and abnormality detection

[16] https://www.isi.uu.nl/Research/Databases/DRIVE/
[17] http://cecas.clemson.edu/~ahoover/stare/
[18] https://blogs.kingston.ac.uk/retinal/chasedb1/

(a) Original Image (b) Segmented output (c) Manual segmented image

Sensitivity: Se=TP/(TP+FN)
Specificity: Sp=TN/(TN+FP)
Positive Predicted Value: PPV=TP/(TP+FP)
Negative predicted Value: NPV=TN/(TN+FN)
Accuracy: Acc=(TP+TN)/(TP+FP+FN+TN)

Table 1: Comparison of manual segmented and automatic segmented

Vessel Present Vessel Absent
Vessel Detected True Positive (TP) False Positive (FP)
Vessel not detected False Negative (FN) True Negative (TN)

Se, Sp, represent the well classified vessels and non vessels, PPV is the ratio of
the pixels that are correctly classified, NPC is the ratio of the pixels of the
background that are correctly classified as background; ACC is the global ratio of
total correctly classified pixels.

(a) Original Image (b) Localization of exudates

Conclusions
This work presents a hybrid approach of extracting retinal blood vessels which are
more important in diagnosis of any retinal diseases. The method includes a contrast
approach that enhance the orientation of the blood vessel which helps the deep
network to localize it accurately. The designed approach tries to locate the
orientation of exudates in the abnormal retinal images and also compares with state
of art traditional methods. The work in novel and tries to include all the
operations that were involved in diabetic retinopathy could be an auxiliary for the
ophthalmologists and radiologists to diagnosis the disease more effectively

Associate Professor,
Dept. of Electronics and Communication Engineering
Holy Mary Institute of Technology & Science (AUTONOMOUS)