Annotating Retina Fundus Images for Teaching and Learning Diabetic Retinopathy Software

Abstract

With the improvement in IT industry, more and more application of computer software is introduced in teaching and learning. In this paper, we discuss the development process of such software. Diabetic Retinopathy is a common complication for diabetic patients. It may cause sight loss if not treated early. There are several stages of this disease. Fundus imagery is required to identify the stage and severity of the disease. Due to the lack of proper dataset of the fundus images and proper annotation, it is very difficult to perform research on this topic. Moreover, medical students are often facing difficulty with identifying the diseases in later stage of their practice as they may not have seen a sample of all of the stages of Diabetic Retinopathy problems. To mitigate the problem, we have collected fundus images from different geographic area of Bangladesh and designed an annotation software to store information about the patient, the infection level and their locations in the images. Sometimes, it is difficult to select all appropriate pixels of the infected region. To resolve the issue, we have introduced a K nearest neighbor (KNN) based technique to accurately select the region of interest (ROI). Once an expert (ophthalmologist) has annotated the images, the software can be used by the students for learning.