A Review of Disease Grading and Remote Diagnosis for Sight Threatening Eye Condition: Age Related Macular Degeneration

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a retinal disorder is the leading cause of vision loss in elderly people in developed countries. Currently, colour fundus imaging is used as a gold standard to assess individual for initial screening of AMD. In this paper, we examine the existing techniques for AMD screening using colour fundus imaging. The aim of the paper is to analyse and review the automated and semi-automated methods for detecting AMD pathologies such as drusen and geographic atrophy (GA) using colour fundus imaging. We intend to provide a brief description, highlighting the key points of the performance measurement and a framework for the existing research. We emphasize that to date; existing drug treatment can stop the progression of AMD and there is no drug or treatment to cure AMD. Therefore, the only feasible option is to prevent the incidence of AMD and avoid this fatal eye disease as well as unnecessary vision loss. For this, a mass screening system that enables remote diagnosis of AMD should be implemented for taking preventative measures in the early stage of AMD. Considering this, we discuss the open problems for automated AMD identification systems using colour fundus imaging and provided future directions for remote diagnosis and screening systems using colour fundus imaging and telemedicine platform