Background: As a major complication of diabetes, diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of visual impairment and blindness due to delayed diagnosis and intervention. Microaneurysm appears as the earliest symptom of DR. Accurate and reliable detection of microaneurysms in color fundus images has great importance for DR screening. Methods: A microaneurysms detection method based on Naive Bayesian classifier is proposed for the early diagnosis of DR. First, blood vessels were enhanced and segmented using the analysis of eigenvalues of Hessian matrix. Next, with blood vessels excluded, microaneurysm candidate regions were obtained according to shape characteristics. After image segmented to patches, the features of each microaneurysm candidate patch were extracted, and each candidate patch was classified using Naive Bayes into microaneurysm or non- microaneurysm. The proposed algorithm was trained and tested on e-ophtha MA database, and further tested on another independent DIARETDB1 database. Results of microaneurysms detection on the two databases were evaluated on lesion level and compared with existing algorithms. Results: The proposed method has achieved better performance compared with existing algorithms. On e-ophtha MA and DIARETDB1 databases, the area under curve (AUC) of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was 0.845 and 0.831, respectively. The free-response ROC (FROC) score on the two databases was 0.362 and 0.207, respectively. Conclusions: The proposed method based on Naive Bayesian classification of image patches can effectively detect microaneurysms in color fundus images and provide an effective scientific basis for early clinical DR diagnosis.

Background: As one of the major complications of diabetes, diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading