Portable Fundus Photographic Machine and Retinal Vessel Segmentation

Many common diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, macular degeneration, glaucoma, eye cancer, optic nerve problems or eye injury may reveal the changes in fundus of the eye, so it?s proper examination is necessary. The General practitioners should be able to recognize pathological changes in the

Project Title

Portable Fundus Photographic Machine and Retinal Vessel Segmentation

Project Area of Specialization

Biomedical Engineering

Project Summary

Many common diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, macular degeneration, glaucoma, eye cancer, optic nerve problems or eye injury may reveal the changes in fundus of the eye, so it’s proper examination is necessary. The General practitioners should be able to recognize pathological changes in the fundus. Basically, our approach is to diminish the work load of ophthalmologist and to make major diagnostic assistance that rely on three major features: "small, portable and simple to comprehend".

We may summarize our project in three main points:

Use of technology for the betterment in the field of medial, specifically eye diseases and its diagnostic purposes

To make a portable and affordable device that could be used by general practitioners.

To develop a device that would be able to give an image of fundus and its vessels in relatively less time for the diagnosing purpose.

Project Objectives

Technology is making our lives easier. If we talk about the medical field, technology has a major hold on it. Several kinds of equipment and tools are involved in the diagnostic process that are reducing work, intensive surgeries and intellectual burdens on clinicians, so we ought to design a portable device which will take image of the fundus of an eye through magnification lenses and a camera, the focus of the lenses can be manually adjustable so basically it would be a sort of light and easy to handle ophthalmoscope. The second part of project includes real time image processing which will enhance the image in such a way that each and every pixel of the image is clear and thus any irregularities in the vessels or in the fundus of the eye would  properly visible to the observer or an eye specialist. in this way, our approach could assists the Ophthalmologist for diagnosing and treatment purposes, basically our motivation is to use the technology for betterment of society and to use our technical skills which is related to image processing and eye optics to assists the eye specialist or general practitioner.

Project Implementation Method

Firstly we will require a data in form of fundus image of an eye of a person, that person may have an eye problem or not but our device would be able to segment out all the vessels of his eye and detect any sort of irregularities in the vessels of that eye. We are designing an ophthalmoscope by using adjustable focus lenses and a camera. The design procedure of ophthalmoscope is as follow: All Ophthalmoscopes follow similar principals as of now, be it a big one or one that is smaller in size. Initially, normal standardized ophthalmoscope is looked at, and then the various variants it can have are discussed. An Ophthalmoscope has a metallic optical tube installed inside, that is manufactured using light weight metal, and the most common is a chrome-plated brass for linear alignment. Within the tube, condensing glass lens, objective lens, prism or mirror aperture dial, a red filter and a lamp are sealed inside. It is important to align the aperture dial in such a way that it maintains its alignment when dropped from a reasonable height. We will manually take the image by this portable fundus photographic machine than we are using a software named MATLAB to develop our own image processing algorithm or a code as for applications involving signal processing, image processing, MATLAB is a more suitable programming language MATLAB has a very large database of built-in algorithms for mathematical modeling image processing, simulations and computer vision applications. The program will receives the fundus image, as an input, and encodes it into a processed fundus image with more obvious patterns of the blood vessels inside the retina, making it much easier for the ophthalmologists to observe several eye conditions. To make it a complete specific device and for the better display we would interface it to the microcontroller however interfacing MATLAB with the microcontroller is a challenging task, we are required MATLAB interfacing through an intermediate MEX C language program. So that a real time image is processed immediately after that we will display this segmented image on the screen or a sort of display gadget. Microprocessors and microcontrollers provide the path for the integration of hardware and software. Microcontrollers have far-reaching applications in the field of instrumentation. The application in the host computer or the server is generally written in C languages, however the major challenge is in interfacing the MATLAB application with the microcontroller. Such requirements involve live reading of images, its processing and display. Our application is to develop a prototype for a medical ophthalmoscope. The application would made in MATLAB to take advantage of the rich image and processing capabilities. The hardware has USB interfacing to the microcontroller for configuration of the various parameters of the internal chips and for performing different operations.

Benefits of the Project

The concept of Fundus photography has long been there and worked on for decades to present the best possible fundus photographs in order to diagnose the eye examinations in the best possible way. After a lot of researches and results, studies have shown that there still remains a void in the field of ophthalmoscopy that needs to be cured by working further on it. Even though researchers have done a wholesome amount of work to paint their hard work with success, the efficiency of these models is still questioned as with time, a lot of errors and inaccurate results might have a much adverse effect on a long-term basis. Moreover, the efficiency or the time consumption also needs to be brought under control as it takes quite a while for patients to receive their examined results and assembling an ophthalmoscope that is portable, relatively smaller in size, and is easy to carry, which will definitely help the modern day ophthalmologists in carrying out the eye screening examinations with much ease, and with a smaller budget, we plan to make a ophthalmoscope that is way more cheap than any of those assembled before, with better fundus results.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

A software hardware integrated device which includes an Ophthalmoscope for image acquisition, which has a metallic optical tube installed inside, that is manufactured using light weight metal, and the most common is a chrome-plated brass for linear alignment. Within the tube, condensing glass lens, objective lens, prism or mirror aperture dial, a red filter and a lamp are sealed inside and a digital camera. The captured image is than processed by using software based simulations, this machine is further integrated with a microcontroller for displaying purpose.

Final Deliverable of the Project

HW/SW integrated system

Core Industry

Medical

Other Industries

Core Technology

Wearables and Implantables

Other Technologies

Sustainable Development Goals

Good Health and Well-Being for People

Required Resources

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