Patent ID: 8243999

Claim:
A method for diagnosing medical conditions having retinal manifestations, comprising the steps of: providing a CBIR system including an archive of stored digital retinal photography images and diagnosed patient data corresponding to said retinal photography images, said stored images each indexed in a CBIR database using a plurality of feature vectors, said feature vectors corresponding to distinct descriptive characteristics of said stored images, and said diagnosed patient data identifying at least one of a plurality of disease states and one of one or more severity levels for the one of the plurality of disease states; obtaining a query image of the retina of a patient; identifying using image processing a plurality of separate regions or structures in said query image; describing said regions or structures using said plurality of feature vectors; retrieving a population of stored images from said database based on similarity to said regions or structures, and diagnosing a disease having retinal manifestations in said patient by: statistically analyzing said diagnosed patient data for said population to determine ones of the plurality of disease stated in said population and a prevalence of the ones of the severity levels corresponding to the ones of the plurality of disease states in said population, determining the absence or presence of a disease state in the patient based on the ones of the plurality of disease states in said population, and, if a disease state is present in the patient, a severity level of the disease state present in the patient based at least on a prevalent one of the severity levels corresponding to the ones of the plurality of disease states in the population associated with the present disease state.