Image processing for early detection of Alzheimer's disease using Iridology

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease is caused by genetics, personal lifestyle and other environmental factors. It is an irreversible disease that slowly destroys the brain memory cells. There are no specific methods for the detection of Alzheimer's disease. The primary symptoms of Alzheimer's disease are memory loss, difficulty in thinking, a problem in writing and speaking and others. Iridology is alternative research that has gained more popularity in recent years, which studies the alterations of the iris in correspondence with the organs of the human body. The combination of digital image processing with Iridology gives an excellent opportunity to explore and learn about different neuronal diseases, specifically Alzheimer's disease. In this work, MATLAB software is applied to determine the colour, pattern and other factors that show the existence of Alzheimer's disease. The noise in the iris image is removed by the Gaussian filter, followed by histogram analyses and cropping. The Hough circle transform is used to identify the region of interest and to convert the circular iris image into rectangle form. In the training methods, the SVM and CNN classifiers are used to classify whether the person has Alzheimer's disease. Finally, the results are compared with the real-time images.