Analysis of the Severity of Hypertensive Retinopathy Using Fuzzy Logic

Eye, an organ associated with vision in man is housed in socket of bone called orbit and is protected from the external air by the eyelids. Hypertensive retinopathy is a one of the leading cause of blindness amongst the working class in the world. The retina is one of the "target organs" that are damaged by sustained hypertension. Subjected to excessively high blood pressure over prolonged time, the small blood vessels that involve the eye are damaged, thickening, bulging and leaking. Early detection can potentially reduce the risk of blindness. An automatic method to detect thickening, bulging and leaking from low contrast digital images of retinopathy patients is developed. Images undergo preprocessing for the removal of noise. Segmentation stage clusters the image into two distinct classes by the use of fuzzy c-means algorithm. This method has been tested using 50 images and the performance is evaluated. The results are encouraging and satisfactory and this method is to be validated by testing 200 samples.