In the United States and most of the western world, the leading causes of vision impairment and blindness are age-related
macular degeneration (AMD), diabetic retinopathy (DR), and glaucoma. In the last decade, research in automatic
detection of retinal lesions associated with eye diseases has produced several automatic systems for detection and
screening of AMD, DR, and glaucoma. However. advanced, sight-threatening stages of DR and AMD can present with
lesions not commonly addressed by current approaches to automatic screening. In this paper we present an automatic eye
screening system based on multiscale Amplitude Modulation-Frequency Modulation (AM-FM) decompositions that
addresses not only the early stages, but also advanced stages of retinal and optic nerve disease. Ten different experiments
were performed in which abnormal features such as neovascularization, drusen, exudates, pigmentation abnormalities,
geographic atrophy (GA), and glaucoma were classified. The algorithm achieved an accuracy detection range of [0.77 to
0.98] area under the ROC curve for a set of 810 images. When set to a specificity value of 0.60, the sensitivity of the
algorithm to the detection of abnormal features ranged between 0.88 and 1.00. Our system demonstrates that, given an
appropriate training set, it is possible to use a unique algorithm to detect a broad range of eye diseases.
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