Retinopathy of Prematurity-assist: Novel Software for Detecting Plus Disease

PURPOSE: To design software with a novel algorithm, which analyzes the tortuosity and vascular dilatation in fundal images of retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) patients with an acceptable accuracy for detecting plus disease. METHODS: Eighty-seven well-focused fundal images taken with RetCam were classified to three groups of plus, non-plus, and pre-plus by agreement between three ROP experts. Automated algorithms in this study were designed based on two methods: the curvature measure and distance transform for assessment of tortuosity and vascular dilatation, respectively as two major parameters of plus disease detection. RESULTS: Thirty-eight plus, 12 pre-plus, and 37 non-plus images, which were classified by three experts, were tested by an automated algorithm and software evaluated the correct grouping of images in comparison to expert voting with three different classifiers, k-nearest neighbor, support vector machine and multilayer perceptron network. The plus, pre-plus, and non-plus images were analyzed with 72.3%, 83.7%, and 84.4% accuracy, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The new automated algorithm used in this pilot scheme for diagnosis and screening of patients with plus ROP has acceptable accuracy. With more improvements, it may become particularly useful, especially in centers without a skilled person in the ROP field.