Artificial intelligence on diabetic retinopathy diagnosis: an automatic classification method based on grey level co-occurrence matrix and naive Bayesian model

AIM: To develop an automatic tool on screening diabetic retinopathy (DR) from diabetic patients. METHODS: We extracted textures from eye fundus images of each diabetes subject using grey level co-occurrence matrix method and trained a Bayesian model based on these textures. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to estimate the sensitivity and specificity of the Bayesian model. RESULTS: A total of 1000 eyes fundus images from diabetic patients in which 298 eyes were diagnosed as DR by two ophthalmologists. The Bayesian model was trained using four extracted textures including contrast, entropy, angular second moment and correlation using a training dataset. The Bayesian model achieved a sensitivity of 0.949 and a specificity of 0.928 in the validation dataset. The area under the ROC curve was 0.938, and the 10-fold cross validation method showed that the average accuracy rate is 93.5%. CONCLUSION: Textures extracted by grey level co-occurrence can be useful information for DR diagnosis, and a trained Bayesian model based on these textures can be an effective tool for DR screening among diabetic patients.