A Novel Computer-Aided Diagnostic System for Early Detection of Diabetic Retinopathy Using 3D-OCT Higher-Order Spatial Appearance Model

Abstract

Early diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy (DR) is of critical importance to suppress severe damage to the retina and/or vision loss. In this study, an optical coherence tomography (OCT)-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) method is proposed to detect DR early using structural 3D retinal scans. This system uses prior shape knowledge to automatically segment all retinal layers of the 3D-OCT scans using an adaptive, appearance-based method. After the segmentation step, novel texture features are extracted from the segmented layers of the OCT B-scans volume for DR diagnosis. For every layer, Markov–Gibbs random field (MGRF) model is used to extract the 2nd-order reflectivity. In order to represent the extracted image-derived features, we employ cumulative distribution function (CDF) descriptors. For layer-wise classification in 3D volume, using the extracted Gibbs energy feature, an artificial neural network (ANN) is fed the extracted feature for every layer. Finally, the classification outputs for all twelve layers are fused using a majority voting schema for global subject diagnosis. A cohort of 188 3D-OCT subjects are used for system evaluation using different k-fold validation techniques and different validation metrics. Accuracy of 90.56%, 93.11%, and 96.88% are achieved using 4-, 5-, and 10-fold cross-validation, respectively. Additional comparison with deep learning networks, which represent the state-of-the-art, documented the promise of our system’s ability to diagnose the DR early.