A development of computer-aided diagnosis system using fundus images

We developed a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system. The purpose of this project is to aid physicians in diagnosing medical images. A CAD system can help physicians by displaying useful information such as the location of abnormalities. Although many kinds of images are used in medical diagnosis, we have focused our research to methods of analyzing fundus images. Physicians normally observe the condition of blood vessels and the retina when examining fundus images. Therefore, we are researching analysis schemes for these objects. Presently, we have improved schemes to detect abnormalities on the retina and analyze blood vessel intersections. In addition, we have developed methods of detecting abnormal widths in blood vessels. We have collected about 450 fundus images and used them to test our schemes. We have obtained relatively good results. In this paper, we give an outline of our system and describe each processing step.