Review on the Role of Macular Edema in Retinopathy, Blindness and Automated Diagnosis Methods

INTRODUCTION: Macular edema is not a disease itself, but, a very common condition in most of the retinal diseases, such as diabetic retinopathy, retinal vein occlusion, hypertensive retinopathy, age-related macular edema, etc. and post-ocular surgery.OBJECTIVES: We have discussed how macular edema plays an important role in blindness in case of various retinal blood vascular diseases and post-ophthalmic surgery. We have analyzed vast state-of-the-art methods for retinal abnormality detection.METHODS: The proposed method uses a semi-automated macula segmentation approach and Local Binary Pattern features to train k-Nearest Neighbor classifier and performs binary classification.RESULTS: We have achieved 80% accuracy and 90% sensitivity in classifying normal and abnormal retina.CONCLUSION: We justified the notion that it will be beneficial to have a method that can analyse the macula region and alert if there is any abnormality near that region to prevent vision loss.