• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.121-128
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• 1995

Information about retinal blood vessels can be used in grading disease severity or as part of the process of automated diagnosis of diseases with ocular menifestations. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting retinal blood vessels and optic disk (papilla) in eye-fundus images. We introduce an algorithm for feature extraction based on Fuzzy Clustering algorithm (fuzzy c-means). A method of finding the optic disk (papilla) is proposed in the eye-fundus images. Additionally, the inrormations such as position and area of the optic disk are extracted. The results are compared to those obtained from other methods. The automatic detection of retinal blood vessels and optic disk in the eye-rundus images could help physicians in diagnosing ocular diseases.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1993 no.11
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• pp.27-30
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• 1993

Information about retinal blood vessels can be used in grading disease severity or as part of the process of automated diagnosis of diseases with ocular menifestations. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting retinal blood vessels and optic disk (papilla) in Eye-fundus images. We introduce an algorithm for feature extraction based on Fuzzy festering(FCM). The results ore compared to those obtained with other methods. The automatic detection of retinal blood vessels and optic disk in the Eye-fundus images could help physicians in diagnosing ocular diseases.

• 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.

• 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.

• Healthcare Informatics Research
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.335-345
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• 2018

Objectives: The retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) is a site of glaucomatous optic neuropathy whose early changes need to be detected because glaucoma is one of the most common causes of blindness. This paper proposes an automated RNFL detection method based on the texture feature by forming a co-occurrence matrix and a backpropagation neural network as the classifier. Methods: We propose two texture features, namely, correlation and autocorrelation based on a co-occurrence matrix. Those features are selected by using a correlation feature selection method. Then the backpropagation neural network is applied as the classifier to implement RNFL detection in a retinal fundus image. Results: We used 40 retinal fundus images as testing data and 160 sub-images (80 showing a normal RNFL and 80 showing RNFL loss) as training data to evaluate the performance of our proposed method. Overall, this work achieved an accuracy of 94.52%. Conclusions: Our results demonstrated that the proposed method achieved a high accuracy, which indicates good performance.

• Journal of The Korean Ophthalmological Society
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• v.59 no.12
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• pp.1160-1165
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• 2018

Purpose: To evaluate the availability of ultra-wide field fundus photography based on eye steering technique to diagnose retinal breaks in patients with symptomatic posterior vitreous detachment (PVD). Methods: The medical records of patients with symptomatic PVD were reviewed. Retinal breaks were independently identified using four eye steering capture images of ultra-wide field fundus photographs. The sensitivity and specificity of eye steering capture imaging for diagnosing retinal breaks were calculated. Results: A total of 94 eyes of 94 patients were included. Using fundus examination after pupil dilatation, retinal breaks were diagnosed in 42 (45%) eyes. The sensitivity of the eye steering capture imaging was 98% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 88-100%), and the specificity was 98% (95% CI: 90-100%). Of the 58 retinal tears, 28 (97%) involving the superior quadrant, 10 (100%) involving the inferior quadrant, 6 (100%) involving the nasal quadrant, and 13 (100%) involving the temporal quadrant were identified using eye steering capture images. Conclusions: Ultra-wide field fundus photography based on eye steering technique was useful for diagnosing retinal breaks in patients with symptomatic PVD. However, eye steering photography could not adequately replace the fundus examination after pupil dilatation in all cases.

• Current Optics and Photonics
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.151-160
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• 2022

Fundus images can reflect ocular diseases and systemic diseases such as glaucoma, diabetes mellitus, and hypertension. Thus, research on fundus-detection equipment is of great importance. The fundus camera has been widely used as a kind of noninvasive detection equipment. Most existing devices can only obtain two-dimensional (2D) retinal-image information, yet the fundus of the human eye also has spectral characteristics. The fundus has many pigments, and their different distributions in the eye lead to dissimilar tissue penetration for light waves, which can reflect the corresponding fundus structure. To obtain more abundant information and improve the detection level of equipment, a snapshot nonmydriatic fundus imaging spectral system, including fundus-imaging spectrometer and illumination system, is studied in this paper. The system uses a microlens array to realize snapshot technology; information can be obtained from only a single exposure. The system does not need to dilate the pupil. Hence, the operation is simple, which reduces its influence on the detected object. The system works in the visible and near-infrared bands (550-800 nm), with a volume less than 400 mm × 120 mm × 75 mm and a spectral resolution better than 6 nm.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.29-37
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• 2021

In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based retinal vessel segmentation model for handling multi-scale information of fundus images. we integrate the selective kernel convolution into U-Net-based convolutional neural network. The proposed model extracts and segment features information with various shapes and sizes of retinal blood vessels, which is important information for diagnosing eye-related diseases from fundus images. The proposed model consists of standard convolutions and selective kernel convolutions. While the standard convolutional layer extracts information through the same size kernel size, The selective kernel convolution extracts information from branches with various kernel sizes and combines them by adaptively adjusting them through split-attention. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, we used the DRIVE and CHASE DB1 datasets and the proposed model showed F1 score of 82.91% and 81.71% on both datasets respectively, confirming that the proposed model is effective in segmenting retinal blood vessels.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.12 no.8
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• pp.1082-1088
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• 2009

Fundus images are highly useful in evaluating patients' retinal conditions in diagnosing eye diseases. In particular, vessel regions are essential in diagnosing diabetes and hypertension. In this paper, we used top-hat filter to compensate for non-uniform background. Image contrast was enhanced by using contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) method. Hessian matrix was next applied to detect vessel regions. Results indicate that our method is 1.3% more accurate than matched filter method. Our proposed method is expected to contribute to diagnosing eye diseases.

• 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.