An Effective Contrast Enhancement Method for Identification of Microaneurysms at Early Stage.

The presence of microaneurysms (MAs) is usually the early sign of diabetic retinopathy (DR) disease. In this study, an effective contrast enhancement scheme has been incorporated with a diabetic screening system to improve the overall quality of MAs identification technique. The proposed scheme is compared with the existing retinal image contrast enhancement methods and a better result is established. Public datasets and also low-contrast noisy images collected from hospitals are used for MA's detection, and satisfactory results are found. The results on low-contrast noisy image diagnosis established the significance of the study. A total of 587 (training = 340, testing = 247) retinal images are examined. The mean sensitivity and specificity are scored as 95.94% and 99.21%, respectively. The value of AUC is 0.932 (SD = 0.013) from the ROC analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]