Currently, there is an increasing interest for setting up medical systems that can screen a large number of people for sight threatening diseases, such as diabetic retinopathy. This paper presents a method for automated identification of exudate pathologies in retinopathy images based on computational intelligence techniques. The color retinal images are segmented using fuzzy c-means clustering following some preprocessing steps, i.e., color normalization and contrast enhancement. The entire segmented images establish a dataset of regions. To classify these segmented regions into exudates and nonexudates, a set of initial features such as color, size, edge strength, and texture are extracted. A genetic-based algorithm is used to rank the features and identify the subset that gives the best classification results. The selected feature vectors are then classified using a multilayer neural network classifier. The algorithm was implemented using a large image dataset consisting of 300 manually labeled retinal images, and could identify affected retinal images with 96.0% sensitivity while it recognized 94.6% of the normal images, i.e., the specificity. Moreover, the proposed scheme illustrated an accuracy including 93.5% sensitivity and 92.1% predictivity for identification of retinal exudates at the pixel level.

The ability of the Web to share data regardless of geographical location raises a new issue called remote authoring. With the Internet and Web browsers being independent of hardware, it becomes possible to build Web-enabled database applications. Many approaches are provided to integrate databases into the Web environment, which use the Web's protocol i.e. HTTP to transfer the data between clients and servers. However, those methods are affected by the HTTP shortfalls with regard to remote authoring. This paper introduces and discusses a new methodology for remote authoring of databases, which is based on the WebDAV protocol. It is a seamless and effective methodology for accessing and authoring databases, particularly in that it naturally benefits from the WebDAV advantages such as metadata and access control. These features establish a standard way of accessing database metadata, and increase the database security, while speeding up the database connection.