Conference Proceeding

EyeArt + EyePACS: Automated Retinal Image Analysis For Diabetic Retinopathy Screening in a Telemedicine System

Authors: , , , , , ,

Abstract

Telemedicine frameworks are key to screening the large, ever-growing diabetic population for preventable blindness due to diabetic retinopathy (DR). Integrating fully-automated screening systems in telemedicine frameworks will make DR screening more efficient, cost-effective, reproducible, and accessible. In this paper, we present the integration of EyeArt, an automated DR screening system, into EyePACS, a telemedicine system for DR screening used in diverse screening settings. EyeArt in- corporates novel image processing and analysis algorithms for assessing image gradability; enhancing images based on median filtering; detecting interest regions and localizing lesions based on multi-scale morphological analysis; and DR screening and thus achieves robustness to the large image variability seen in a telemedicine system such as EyePACS. EyeArt is implemented as a scalable, high-throughput cloud-based system to enable large-scale DR screening. We evaluate the safety and performance of EyeArt on a dataset with 434,023 images from 54,324 patient cases obtained from EyePACS. On this dataset, EyeArt’s screening sensitivity is 90% at specificity 60.8% and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) is 0.883. In a setup where trained human graders review patient cases recommended for referral by EyeArt with low confidence, a workload reduction of 62% is possible. Therefore, EyeArt can be safely integrated into large real world telemedicine DR screening programs such as EyePACS helping reduce workload and increase efficiency and thus help in reducing vision loss due to DR through early detection and treatment.

Keywords: image analysis, telemedicine, screening, diabetic retinopathy, EyeArt, EyePACS

How to Cite: Bhaskaranand, M. , Cuadros, J. , Ramachandra, C. , Bhat, S. , Nittala, M. G. , Sadda, S. R. & Solanki, K. (2015) “EyeArt + EyePACS: Automated Retinal Image Analysis For Diabetic Retinopathy Screening in a Telemedicine System”, Proceedings of the Ophthalmic Medical Image Analysis International Workshop. 2(2015). doi: https://doi.org/10.17077/omia.1033