A Machine Learning based Approach for Segmenting Retinal Nerve Images using Artificial Neural Networks

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Machine Learning (ML) is gaining more attention from researchers. In ophthalmology, ML has been applied to fundus photographs, achieving robust classification performance in the detection of diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, retinopathy of prematurity, etc. The detection and extraction of blood vessels in the retina is an essential part of various diagnosing problems associated with eyes, such as diabetic retinopathy. This paper proposes a novel machine learning approach to segment the retinal blood vessels from eye fundus images using a combination of color features, texture features, and Back Propagation Neural Networks (BPNN). The proposed method comprises of two steps, namely the color texture feature extraction and training the BPNN to get the segmented retinal nerves. Magenta color and correlation-texture features are given as input to the BPNN. The system was trained and tested in retinal fundus images taken from two distinct databases. The average sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy obtained for the segmentation of retinal blood vessels were 0.470%, 0.914%, and 0.903% respectively. Results obtained reveal that the proposed methodology is excellent in automated segmentation retinal nerves. The proposed segmentation methodology was able to obtain comparable accuracy with other methods.