Automatic Drusen Detection from Digital Retinal Images: AMD Prevention

The age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the main cause of blindness among people over 50 years in developed countries and there are 150 million people affected worlwide. This disease can lead to severe loss central vision and adversely affect the patient’s quality of life. The appearance of drusen is associated with the early AMD, so we proposed a top-down methodology to detect drusen in initial stages to prevent AMD. The proposed methodology has several stages where the key issues are the detection and characterization of suspect areas. We test our method with a set of 1280 × 1024 images, obtaining a system with a high sensitivity in the localization of drusen, not just fake injuries.