Sekineh Asadi Amiri - Department of Computer Engineering, Shahrood University of Technology, Shahrood, Iran
Hamid Hassanpour - Department of Computer Engineering, Shahrood University of Technology, Shahrood, Iran
Masoumeh Shahiri - Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Babol University of Technology, Babol, Iran
Reza Ghaderi - Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Babol University of Technology, Babol, Iran

This paper presents an automated method for detecting microaneurysms in the retinal angiographic images by using image processing techniques. In the presented method, in order to fade or remove the pseudo images, first retinal images are pre-processed. Then microaneurysms are identified by circular Hough transform. In the existing methods of detecting microaneurysms, it is necessary to identify the vessels in the surface of the retina and to remove them from the background of the image. But in the proposed method, first by using the circular Hough transform the central point of the microaneurysms lesion is identified. Then by using the region growing technique, the total areas of pixels associated with these lesions are identified. In this proposed method due to the removal of the vascular diagnosis which has been very time consuming, the speed of the algorithm has significantly been increased. Results received from the retinal images of five patients show that the accuracy of the proposed method in detecting microaneurysms is about %88.5 that in comparison with other existing methods has higher speed and more accuracy.

Angiography, Image processing, Circular Hough transform, Diabetic retinopathy, Region growing process, Microaneurysms