Detection of cotton wool for diabetic retinopathy analysis using neural network

This paper presents an automatic segmentation method used to detect cotton wool spots in the retinal images for diabetic retinopathy disease. An early detection of cotton wool is important to prevent the dangerous damage which may cause blindness and vision loss. A preprocessing is applied to enhance image quality followed by optic disc removal. A feature extraction method is used to take useful elements from the image for increasing accuracy in classification step. A neural network model is employed for learning task and tested by k-fold cross validation. Our approach is evaluated by ground truth on DIARETDB1 public data. The result shows that cotton wool can be segmented by this method with 85.9% in sensitivity, 84.4% in specificity, and 85.54% in accuracy.