Early Diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy in OCTA Images Based on Local Analysis of Retinal Blood Vessels and Foveal Avascular Zone

This paper introduces a diagnosis system for detecting early signs of diabetic retinopathy (DR) using optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) images. We developed a segmentation technique that was able to extract blood vessels from both retinal superficial and deep maps. It is based on a higher order joint Markov-Gibbs random field (MGRF) model, which combines both current and spatial appearance information of retinal blood vessels. To be able to train/test a support vector machine (SVM) classifier, three local features were extracted from the segmented images. These extracted features are the density and appearance of the retinal blood vessels in addition to the distance map of the foveal avascular zone (FAZ). Then, we used SVM with linear kernel to distinguish sub-clinical DR patients from normal cases. By using 105 subjects, the presented computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system demonstrated an overall accuracy (ACC) of 97.3 % and a Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 97.9%.