This work presents a qualitative measurement of anterior segment photographed images (ASPIs) to identify between normal eyes and eyes with pterygium and pinguecula through Otsu multi-thresholding approach without contrast enhancement. In addition, we also propose a mobile screening framework of ASPIs through smartphones. ASPIs were directly sent to the cloud storage once an ASPI was captured using a smartphone camera, and then each image was processed through a digital image processing approach in a processing platform. Three important steps, namely, pre-processing, image segmentation and qualitative assessment, are involved in the processing platform of the mobile screening framework. The ASPIs are pre-processed to minimise or eliminate any unwanted areas within the image. Then, these ASPIs are segmented through multi-thresholding Otsu approach with clustering number n = 3. Segmentation result shows that the accuracy of the proposed method is 87.5%, which is comparable with the previously established work that has applied three-step differencing (3SD) method. However, the proposed approach has better computational time which is six times faster than the 3SD method. These results demonstrate a remarkable effort to produce a simple but straightforward digital image processing approach to be implemented in cloud computing for future studies.

No abstract

The image retrieval system has been used to provide the needed correct images to the physicians while the diagnosis and treatment process is being conducted. The earlier image retrieval system was a text-based image retrieval system (TBIRS) that used keywords for the image context and it requires human’s help to manually make text annotation on the images. The text annotation process is a laborious task especially when dealing with a huge database and is prone to human errors. To overcome the aforementioned issues, the approach of a content-based image retrieval system (CBIRS) with automatic indexing using visual features such as colour, shape and texture becomes popular. Thus, this study proposes a semi-automated shape segmentation method using a 12-anatomical point representation method of the human spine vertebrae for CBIRS. The 12 points, which are annotated manually on the region of interest (ROI), is followed by automatic ROI extraction. The segmentation method performs excellently, as evidenced by the highest accuracy of 0.9987, specificity of 0.9989, and sensitivity of 0.9913. The features of the segmented ROI are extracted with a novel global Hu-F descriptor that combines a global shape descriptor, a Hu moment invariant, and a Fourier descriptor based on the ANOVA selection approach. The retrieval phase is implemented using 100 MRI data of the human spine for thoracic, lumbar, and sacral bones. The highest obtained precision is 0.9110 using a normalized Manhattan metric for lumbar bones. In a conclusion, a retrieval system to retrieve lumbar bones of the MRI human spine has been successfully developed to help radiologists in diagnosing human spine diseases.