الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract Age-related macular degeneration, AMD, and retinal vascular diseases especially diabetic retinopathy, DR, are among the major causes of untreatable blindness worldwide. Such conditions are currently being managed by laser photocoagulation in many treatment sessions. During this procedure, a doctor places more than 1200 laser burn spots or more on the affected areas of the retina causing coagulation and death of these areas. Because laser can damage them, the burns should be away from macula, fovea, optical nerve and the main blood vessels. This process of treatment has about 50% failure rate. According to the literatures, the success rate of this process may be increased to more than 90% if the treatment is achieved in one session. Efforts are being done by the researchers to automate the process and increase its success rate. A method for automatic retinal tracking was proposed more than one decade ago. In this method, it was suggested to capture a fundus image and process it to determine the positions of laser shots. The coordinates of these positions are to be updated automatically with the motion of the retina via retinal tracking algorithms. The updated positions are to be fed to a beam steering apparatus to direct the laser beam accordingly. Since that time, the researchers are trying to compensate for the time taken by tracking and scanning to avoid damaging the sensitive objects. |