Multichannel Spectral Image Enhancement for Visualizing Diabetic Retinopathy Lesions

Abstract

Abstract. Spectral imaging is a useful tool in many fields of scientific research and industry. Spectral images contain both spatial and spectral information of the scene. Spectral information can be used for effective visualization of the features-of-interest. One approach is to use spectral image enhancement techniques to improve the diagnostic accuracy of medical image technologies like retinal imaging. In this paper, two multichannel spectral image enhancement methods and a technique to further improve the visualization are presented. The methods are tested on four multispectral retinal images which contain diabetic retinopathy lesions. Both of the methods improved the detectability and quantitative contrast of the diabetic lesions when compared to standard color images and are potentially valuable for clinicians and automated image analyses.