At the 39th International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva, Switzerland held in April, PolyU won several awards, including a Gold Award with the Congratulations of the Jury for its research “An Innovative Secured Retinal Imaging System for Computer Aided Non-intrusive Diabetic Care”.

It is a novel medical imaging system which performs non-intrusive detection of diabetic retinopathy with a high-performance fundus camera and provides information security and privacy protection by effective lossless data embedding. Prof. Jane You Jia of PolyU’s Department of Computing, is the Principal Investigator of this research.

Introduction:

With the increasing population of diabetic patients worldwide, it is crucial to detect various diabetic complications timely, efficiently and conveniently for large-scale screening at low cost. However, the conventional blood glucose testing does not provide the progress status of diabetic chronic complications such as diabetic retinopathy (DR) for non-intrusive diabetic care.

By developing new approaches to hierarchical retinal image analysis and lossless data embedding associated with a high-performance fundus camera, we have invented a computer aided detection (CAD) system to achieve non-intrusive DR screening and monitoring with privacy protection. The comprehensive performance assessment of our prototype demonstrates its feasibility for effective diabetic care with wide applications and excellent potentials.

Special Features and Advantages:

• a special optical design for a new model of fundus camera for lighting normalization and position alignment
• a hierarchical approach to retinal image analysis by multiple feature extraction and coarse-to-fine lesion detection
• a wavelet based scheme for lossless data embedding to facilitate information security and privacy protection

Application(s)

• The new effective retinal image analysis software in conjunction with the high performance fundus camera has wide clinical applications not only by ophthalmologists for eye care but also by other medical specialists for general health services including healthcare and telemedicine
• The new algorithms for lossless data embedding will have significant contribution to information technology ranging from multimedia to information security

Fig. 1 The structure of the new retinal imaging system

Fig. 2 An example of lossless data embedding: Embedding a face image into retinal image for privacy protection

Fig. 3 Illustration of hierarchical detection of retinopathy