A method for detecting abnormalities or suspicious artifacts in a retinal image and training a learning machine on retinal images, the method including: acquiring data features from the retinal image； mapping a structure of a retinal blood vessel network from the retinal image； analyzing the structure to compute blood vessel features； and analyzing a set of the data features from the retinal image vis-à-vis a corresponding set of the blood vessel features. All these features are used to train a learning machine mechanism to improve statistical models.
