A GMM-based feature extraction technique for the automated diagnosis of Retinopathy of Prematurity

Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) is an ophthalmic disease that is a leading cause of childhood blindness throughout the world. Accurate diagnosis of ROP is vital to identify infants who require treatment, which can prevent blindness. Arterial tortuosity and venous dilation in the retina are important signs of ROP, so it is necessary to extract these features from points on the vessels or vessel segments. Then, an image is represented with statistics such as minimum, maximum or mean of these values. However, these statistics provide biased estimates as an image contains both healthy and abnormal vessels. In this work, we present a novel feature extraction technique that represents each image with the parameters of a two-component Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). Using these features, we performed classification experiments on a manually segmented retinal image dataset consisting of 77 images. The results show that GMM-based features outperform other features that are based on classical statistics, with accuracy over 90%. Moreover, if the features are extracted from the whole image without distinguishing veins and arteries, proposed features provide better performance compared to using traditional statistics.