Fundus images of the retina are color images of the eye taken by specially designed digital cameras. Ophthalmologists rely on fundus images to diagnose various diseases that affect the eye, such as diabetic retinopathy and retinopathy of prematurity. A crucial preliminary step in the analysis of retinal images is the identification and localization of important anatomical structures, such as the optic nerve head (ONH), the macula, and the major vascular arcades. Identification of the ONH is an important initial step in the detection and analysis of the anatomical structures and pathological features in the retina. Different types of retinal pathology may be detected and analyzed via the application of appropriately designed techniques of digital image processing and pattern recognition. Computer-aided analysis of retinal images has the potential to facilitate quantitative and objective analysis of retinal lesions and abnormalities. Accurate identification and localization of retinal features and lesions could contribute to improved diagnosis, treatment, and management of retinopathy.

This book presents an introduction to diagnostic imaging of the retina and an overview of image processing techniques for ophthalmology. In particular, digital image processing algorithms and pattern analysis techniques for the detection of the ONH are described. In fundus images, the ONH usually appears as a bright region, white or yellow in color, and is indicated as the convergent area of the network of blood vessels. Use of the geometrical and intensity characteristics of the ONH, as well as the property that the ONH represents the location of entrance of the blood vessels and the optic nerve into the retina, is demonstrated in developing the methods.

The image processing techniques described in the book include morphological filters for preprocessing fundus images, filters for edge detection, the Hough transform for the detection of lines and circles, Gabor filters to detect the blood vessels, and phase portrait analysis for the detection of convergent or node-like patterns. Illustrations of application of the methods to fundus images from two publicly available databases are presented, in terms of locating the center and the boundary of the ONH. Methods for quantitative evaluation of the results of detection of the ONH using measures of overlap and free-response receiver operating characteristics are also described.

The identification and interpretation of the signs of breast cancer in mammographic images from screening programs can be very difficult due to the subtle and diversified appearance of breast disease. This book presents new image processing and pattern recognition techniques for computer-aided detection and diagnosis of breast cancer in its various forms. The main goals are: (1) the identification of bilateral asymmetry as an early sign of breast disease which is not detectable by other existing approaches; and (2) the detection and classification of masses and regions of architectural distortion, as benign lesions or malignant tumors, in a unified framework that does not require accurate extraction of the contours of the lesions. The innovative aspects of the work include the design and validation of landmarking algorithms, automatic Tabar masking procedures, and various feature descriptors for quantification of similarity and for contour independent classification of mammographic lesions. Characterization of breast tissue patterns is achieved by means of multidirectional Gabor filters. For the classification tasks, pattern recognition strategies, including Fisher linear discriminant analysis, Bayesian classifiers, support vector machines, and neural networks are applied using automatic selection of features and cross-validation techniques. Computer-aided detection of bilateral asymmetry resulted in accuracy up to 0.94, with sensitivity and specificity of 1 and 0.88, respectively. Computer-aided diagnosis of automatically detected lesions provided sensitivity of detection of malignant tumors in the range of [0.70, 0.81] at a range of falsely detected tumors of [0.82, 3.47] per image. The techniques presented in this work are effective in detecting and characterizing various mammographic signs of breast disease.