Retinal image dataset of infants and retinopathy of prematurity

Abstract

Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) represents a vasoproliferative disease, especially in newborns and infants, which can potentially affect and damage the vision. Despite recent advances in neonatal care and medical guidelines, ROP still remains one of the leading causes of worldwide childhood blindness. The paper presents a unique dataset of 6,004 retinal images of 188 newborns, most of whom are premature infants. The dataset is accompanied by the anonymized patients' information from the ROP screening acquired at the University Hospital Ostrava, Czech Republic. Three digital retinal imaging camera systems are used in the study: Clarity RetCam 3, Natus RetCam Envision, and Phoenix ICON. The study is enriched by the software tool ReLeSeT which is aimed at automatic retinal lesion segmentation and extraction from retinal images. Consequently, this tool enables computing geometric and intensity features of retinal lesions. Also, we publish a set of pre-processing tools for feature boosting of retinal lesions and retinal blood vessels for building classification and segmentation models in ROP analysis.