Retinal image registration and comparison for clinical decision support.

Background: For eye diseases, such as glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration (ARMD), involved in long-term degeneration procedure, longitudinal comparison of retinal images is a common step for reliable diagnosis of these kinds of diseases.

Aims: To provide a retinal image registration approach for longitudinal retinal image alignment and comparison.

Method: Two image registration solutions were proposed for facing different image qualities of retinal images to make the registration methods more robust and feasible in a clinical application system.

Results: Thirty pairs of longitudinal retinal images were used for the registration test. The experiments showed both solutions provided good performance for the accurate image registrations with efficiency.

Conclusion: We proposed a set of retinal image registration solutions for longitudinal retinal image observation and comparison targeting a clinical application environment.