A variety of vision ailments are associated with the foveal region of the eye. In current clinical practice, the ophthalmologist manually detects potential presence of such ailments based on fundus autofluorescence (FAF) images, and hence diagnoses the disease, when relevant. However, in view of the general scarcity of ophthalmologists relative to the large number of subjects seeking eyecare, especially in remote regions, it becomes imperative to develop methods to direct expert time and effort to medically significant cases. To serve the interest of both the ophthalmologist and the potential patient, we plan a screening step, where healthy and diseased eyes are algorithmically differentiated with limited input from only optometrists who are relatively more abundant in number. Specifically, an early treatment diabetic retinopathy study (ETDRS) grid is placed by an optometrist on each FAF image, based on which sectoral statistics are automatically collected. Using such statistics as features, healthy and diseased eyes are proposed to be classified by training an algorithm using available medical records. In this connection, we consider support vector machine (SVM) with linear as well as radial basis function (RBF) kernel, and observe satisfactory performance of both variants. Among those, we recommend the latter in view of its slight superiority in terms of classification accuracy (90.55% at a standard training-to-test ratio of 80:20), and practical class-conditional costs. © 2021 IEEE