The Detection Of Retinal Microbleeds Based On COSFIRE Filter

Diabetes is exploding in China.It is estimated that close to 10%of the population has diabetes.Diabetic retinopathy(DR)is one of the most important performance of diabetic microangiopathy.Among the early signs of DR,microbleeds are the first signs of the presence of DR which an easily be quantified by optical retinal fundus imaging.So we need to set up a large-scale screening program in China,first for diabetic retinopathy,later as a one-stop-shop also for glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration.Fundus screening is cost-effective,non-invasive and fast.Early detection and diagnosis of DR is crucial for the prevention of visual loss.Therefore,retinal microbleeds detection is of paramount importance for the early diagnoses of DR.Although microbleeds can be automatically detected by the methods,several problems still exist,such as high error detection rate,high miss rate,complex operation.The fundamental reason is that these methods are mainly using gradient information to describe the image.In this paper,we use a trainable filter which we call Combination Of Shifted Filter Response(COSFIRE)to detect the retinal microbleeds automatically.A COSFIRE filter is automatically configured by a prototype pattern and can then be used to detect the same and similar patterns in given images.A COSFIRE filter is conceptually simple and straight forward to implement:It requires the application of selected Gabor filters,Gaussian blurring of their responses,shifting of the blurred responses by specific,different vectors,and multiplying the shifted responses.The reason why we choose retinal check to detect diabetes is that fundus examination is much cheaper and takes less time than other instruments,such as CT,MRI and Ultrasonic.Most people can afford it.And retinal check is suitable for large-scale retinal screening because of little cost.In our study,COSFIRE filter with the combination of rotation invariance,scale invariance and reflection invariance can detect the retinal microbleeds well.The microbleeds'shape is various and COSFIRE can solve the shape diversity of retinal microbleeds.Using COSFIRE filter can detect retinal microbleeds effectively.