Towards automatic detection of age-related macular degeneration in retinal fundus images

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a leading cause of blindness worldwide. The disease is highly associated with age, and becoming increasingly prevalent in our aging societies. Drusen is a pathological feature that is well-associated with AMD. In this paper, we present a method of detecting drusen in retinal fundus images. The method first determines the location of the macula, which is used as a landmark for a clinical drusen grading overlay. Subsequently, regions of drusen are identified though a maximal region-based pixel intensity approach via RGB and HSV channels. Methods of reducing the effect of retinal and choroidal vessels are also described. The system is tested on a sample set of 16 fundus images from a clinical study, with half having drusen. Experiments on the results show a sensitivity and specificity of 0.75 on the test image set.