Patent ID: 8868155

Claim:
A method of predicting early diabetic retinopathy comprising: obtaining thickness values from optical coherence tomogram (OCT) data for a retina of a subject; detecting whether an abnormal pattern is present in the thickness values based on a comparison of the thickness values to a reference data set; upon detecting the abnormal pattern in the thickness values, predicting early diabetic retinopathy in the subject based on a weighted predictor function calculated by a processor as: PEDR ⁡ ( M D , M C ) = min ⁢ ∑ i = 1 N ⁢ w i × d ⁡ ( M Di , M Ci ) wherein w i is a weight coefficient (w i >=0, i=1 . . . N), d is a distance function; M Di , M Ci are measured values of criteria comprising thickness, reflectance, scattering coefficient, and texture measures for the retina of the subject and normal healthy subjects, respectively; N is the number of criteria considered in the analysis (N=4); and PEDR is a natural distance measure for similarity search where w, is the extent to which M Di is matched to M Ci .