A novel method for retinal optic disc detection using bat meta-heuristic algorithm

• Published in: Medical & biological engineering & computing Vol. 56; no. 11; pp. 2015 - 2024
• Main Authors: Abdullah, Ahmad S., Özok, Yasa Ekşioğlu, Rahebi, Javad
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.11.2018; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Algorithms; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering; Biomedicine; Blood vessels; Computer Applications; Diabetes mellitus; Diabetic retinopathy; Elliptic fitting; Glaucoma; Gray scale; Heuristic methods; Human Physiology; Image detection; Image processing; Image segmentation; Imaging; Nitric oxide; Original Article; Preprocessing; Radiology; Retina; Retinal images; Retinopathy; Accuracy; Optic disc segmentation; Retinal image; Bat algorithm; Gray scale imaging
• ISSN: 0140-0118; 1741-0444; 1741-0444
• DOI: 10.1007/s11517-018-1840-1

Normally, the optic disc detection of retinal images is useful during the treatment of glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. In this paper, the novel preprocessing of a retinal image with a bat algorithm (BA) optimization is proposed to detect the optic disc of the retinal image. As the optic disk is a bright area and the vessels that emerge from it are dark, these facts lead to the selected segments being regions with a great diversity of intensity, which does not usually happen in pathological regions. First, in the preprocessing stage, the image is fully converted into a gray image using a gray scale conversion, and then morphological operations are implemented in order to remove dark elements such as blood vessels, from the images. In the next stage, a bat algorithm (BA) is used to find the optimum threshold value for the optic disc location. In order to improve the accuracy and to obtain the best result for the segmented optic disc, the ellipse fitting approach was used in the last stage to enhance and smooth the segmented optic disc boundary region. The ellipse fitting is carried out using the least square distance approach. The efficiency of the proposed method was tested on six publicly available datasets, MESSIDOR, DRIVE, DIARETDB1, DIARETDB0, STARE, and DRIONS-DB. The optic disc segmentation average overlaps and accuracy was in the range of 78.5–88.2% and 96.6–99.91% in these six databases. The optic disk of the retinal images was segmented in less than 2.1 s per image. The use of the proposed method improved the optic disc segmentation results for healthy and pathological retinal images in a low computation time. Graphical abstract ᅟ