Mobile-based risk assessment of diabetic retinopathy using a smartphone and adapted ophtalmoscope

The large prevalence of diabetes in the global population is associated with an increasing number of Diabetic Retinopathy cases. This disease is associated with a progressive risk of blindness, due to physiological changes that affect the retina. Since most of the progression is asymptomatic and late stage damage is often irreversible, there is a large incentive to implement effective methodologies that allow large scale screening of the diabetic population. In this work, a research study of a mobile approach for the assessment of Diabetic Retinopathy was conducted, by analyzing 80 patients already being followed for ophthalmological care. A smartphone-based fundus imaging system was used to acquire images of the retina during the normal clinical workflow in a Central Hospital in Portugal. Relevant images were automatically analyzed by a Decision Support System (DSS) based on computer vision methods. The results were obtained for ground-truth correlation as well as time impact of this novel system. Our conclusions support that the DSS is highly sensitive in detecting pathological information on images, after a dedicated quality image filtering, and the acquisition procedure has minimal adverse impact in the clinical setting.