Automated segmentation of ophthalmological images by an optical based approach for early detection of eye tumor growing

•We present a novel and automatic method for segmenting the iris tumors.•We investigate several methods after being applied for the iris tumors segmentation.•The Eye Cancer and the Miles Research databases are used to test the proposed system.•Several metrics reveal that the proposed method yields better performance.•Using proposed method for early detection can make clinical system more reliable. Iris neoplasm is a non-symptom cancer that causes a gradual loss of sight. The first purpose of this study was to present a novel and automatic method for segmenting the iris tumors and detecting the corresponding areas changing along time. The second aim of this work was to investigate several recently published methods after being applied for the iris tumors segmentation. Our approach consists firstly in segmenting the iris region by using the Vander Lugt correlator based active contour method. Secondly, by treating only the iris region, a K-means clustering model was used to assign the tumorous tissue to one pixel-cluster. This model is quite sensitive to the center initialization and to the choice of the distance measure. To solve these problems, a proportional probability based approach was introduced for the cluster center initialization, and the impact of several distance measure was investigated. The proposed method and the different comparative methods were evaluated on two databases: the Eye Cancer and the Miles Research. Results reported using several performance metrics reveal that the first step assures the detection of all iris tumors with an accuracy of 100%. Additionally, the proposed method yields better performance compared to the recently published methods.