Computer Aided Diagnosis of Multiple Eye Fundus Diseases From Color Fundus Photograph

Blindness can be caused by many ocular diseases, such as diabetic retinopathy, retinal vein occlusion, age-related macular degeneration, pathologic myopia and glaucoma. Without timely diagnosis and adequate medical intervention, the visual impairment can become a great burden on individuals as well as the society. It is estimated that China has 110 million patients under the attack of diabetes, 180 million patients with hypertension, 120 million patients suffering from high myopia and 200 million people over 60 years old, which suggest a huge population at the risk of blindness. Despite of this crisis in public health, our society has no more than 3,000 ophthalmologists majoring in fundus oculi disease currently. As most of them assembling in metropolitan cities, health system in this field is frail in primary hospitals. Owing to this unreasonable distribution of medical resources, providing medical service to hundreds of millions of potential patients threatened with blindness is almost impossible.

To solve this problem, this software (MCS) was developed as a computer-aided diagnosis to help junior ophthalmologists to detect 13 major retina diseases from color fundus photographs. This study has been designed to validate the safety and efficiency of this device.