A HW/SW System to Detect Druses in Retinal Fundus Image for the Diagnostic of Age Related Macular Degeneration

Age related macular degeneration (AMD) is a degenerative condition that strikes the human central vision and it is pointed as one of the leading causes of blindness among individuals over 50 years old in undeveloped countries. The existence of yellow/white deposits in the retina, called drusen, is one of the main signals of AMD. Drusen are found and analyzed using retinal images, which is a subjective and time consuming process. This work proposes a method of drusen detection and quantification performed in an embedded system as a low cost and high potential solution to support the diagnosis of AMD. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated in the public image dataset STARE. The method has been tested in two different architectures: a software only and a hardware/software which was implemented in the TERASIC development kit DE2i-150. The hardware/software approach accelerated the execution of the algorithm.