Automated segmentation of hard exudates in colour fundus images is a challenge task due to issues of extreme class imbalance and enormous size variation. This paper aims to tackle these issues and proposes a dual-branch network with dual-sampling modulated Dice loss. It consists of two branches: large hard exudate biased learning branch and small hard exudate biased learning branch. Both of them are responsible for their own duty separately. Furthermore, we propose a dual-sampling modulated Dice loss for the training such that our proposed dual-branch network is able to segment hard exudates in different sizes. In detail, for the first branch, we use a uniform sampler to sample pixels from predicted segmentation mask for Dice loss calculation, which leads to this branch naturally be biased in favour of large hard exudates as Dice loss generates larger cost on misidentification of large hard exudates than small hard exudates. For the second branch, we use a re-balanced sampler to oversample hard exudate pixels and undersample background pixels for loss calculation. In this way, cost on misidentification of small hard exudates is enlarged, which enforces the parameters in the second branch fit small hard exudates well. Considering that large hard exudates are much easier to be correctly identified than small hard exudates, we propose an easy-to-difficult learning strategy by adaptively modulating the losses of two branches. We evaluate our proposed method on two public datasets and results demonstrate that ours achieves state-of-the-art performances.
Heritage Institute of Technology（遗产理工学院）；Tata Consultancy Services（塔塔咨询服务公司）
Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a complication of long-standing, unchecked diabetes and one of the leading causes of blindness in the world. This paper focuses on improved and robust methods to extract some of the features of DR, viz. Blood Vessels and Exudates. Blood vessels are segmented using multiple morphological and thresholding operations. For the segmentation of exudates, k-means clustering and contour detection on the original images are used. Extensive noise reduction is performed to remove false positives from the vessel segmentation algorithm's results. The localization of Optic Disc …
Centre Universitaire Condorcet（孔多塞大学中心）；Université de Bourgogne（勃艮第大学）
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) and age related macular degeneration (ARMD) are among the major causes of visual impairment worldwide. DR is mainly characterized by red spots, namely microaneurysms and bright lesions, specifically exudates whereas ARMD is mainly identified by tiny yellow or white deposits called drusen. Since exudates might be the only manifestation of the early diabetic retinopathy, there is an increase demand for automatic retinopathy diagnosis. Exudates and drusen may share similar appearances, thus discriminating between them is of interest to enhance screening performance. In t…
COMSATS University Islamabad（伊斯兰堡 COMSATS 大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）；Victoria University（维多利亚大学）
Diabetic retinopathy refers to the pathology of the retina induced by diabetes and is one of the leading causes of preventable blindness in the world. Early detection of diabetic retinopathy is critical to avoid vision problem through continuous screening and treatment. In traditional clinical practice, the involved lesions are manually detected using photographs of the fundus. However, this task is cumbersome and time-consuming and requires intense effort due to the small size of lesion and low contrast of the images. Thus, computer-assisted diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy based on the dete…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Segmentation of multiple anatomical structures is of great importance in medical image analysis. In this study, we proposed a $\mathcal{W}$-net to simultaneously segment both the optic disc (OD) and the exudates in retinal images based on the multi-task learning (MTL) scheme. We introduced a class-balanced loss and a multi-task weighted loss to alleviate the imbalanced problem and to improve the robustness and generalization property of the $\mathcal{W}$-net. We demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach by applying five-fold cross-validation experiments on two public datasets e\_ophtha\_E…
In this manuscript, we present a robust method for glaucoma screening from fundus images using an ensemble of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The pipeline comprises of first segmenting the optic disk and optic cup from the fundus image, then extracting a patch centered around the optic disk and subsequently feeding to the classification network to differentiate the image as diseased or healthy. In the segmentation network, apart from the image, we make use of spatial co-ordinate (X \& Y) space so as to learn the structure of interest better. The classification network is composed of a De…
Universitat Rovira i Virgili（罗维拉-威尔吉利大学）；Bioinformatics Institute（生物信息学研究所）
In this paper, an optic disc and cup segmentation method is proposed using U-Net followed by a multi-scale feature matching network. The proposed method targets task 2 of the REFUGE challenge 2018. In order to solve the segmentation problem of task 2, we firstly crop the input image using single shot multibox detector (SSD). The cropped image is then passed to an encoder-decoder network with skip connections also known as generator. Afterwards, both the ground truth and generated images are fed to a convolution neural network (CNN) to extract their multi-level features. A dice loss function is…
Explainable Convolutional Neural Networks for Retinal Fundus Classification and Cutting-Edge Segmentation Models for Retinal Blood Vessels from Fundus Images
Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology（阿萨努拉科技大学）
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局）；CONICET（国家科学技术研究委员会）；Medical University of Vienna（维也纳医科大学）；VUNO Inc.（VUNO公司）；Inserm（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；Univ Bretagne Occidentale（西布列塔尼大学）；Zasti（Zasti公司）
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of visual impairment among elderly in the world. Early detection of AMD is of great importance, as the vision loss caused by this disease is irreversible and permanent. Color fundus photography is the most cost-effective imaging modality to screen for retinal disorders. Cutting edge deep learning based algorithms have been recently developed for automatically detecting AMD from fundus images. However, there are still lack of a comprehensive annotated dataset and standard evaluation benchmarks. To deal with this issue, we set up the Au…
Automated Computer Aided diagnostic tools can be used for the early detection of glaucoma to prevent irreversible vision loss. In this work, we present a Multi-task Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that jointly segments the Optic Disc (OD), Optic Cup (OC) and predicts the presence of glaucoma in color fundus images. The CNN utilizes a combination of image appearance features and structural features obtained from the OD-OC segmentation to obtain a robust prediction. The use of fewer network parameters and the sharing of the CNN features for multiple related tasks ensures the good generalizabi…
Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) are regions of prominent clinical interest in a retinal fundus image. They are the primary indicators of a glaucomatous condition. With the advent and success of deep learning for healthcare research, several approaches have been proposed for the segmentation of important features in retinal fundus images. We propose a novel approach for the simultaneous segmentation of the OD and OC using a residual encoder-decoder network (REDNet) based regional convolutional neural network (RCNN). The RED-RCNN is motivated by the Mask RCNN (MRCNN). Performance comparisons …
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the most common form of diabetic eye disease. Retinopathy can affect all diabetic patients and becomes particularly dangerous, increasing the risk of blindness, if it is left untreated. The success rate of its curability solemnly depends on diagnosis at an early stage. The development of automated computer aided disease diagnosis tools could help in faster detection of symptoms with a wider reach and reasonable cost. This paper proposes a method for the automated segmentation of retinal lesions and optic disk in fundus images using a deep fully convolutional neural…
Google AI（谷歌人工智能）；Google（谷歌公司）；Rajavithi Hospital（拉差威提医院）；College of Medicine, Rangsit University（兰实大学医学院）；EyePACS LLC（EyePACS有限责任公司）；University of California（加利福尼亚大学）；Google DeepMind（谷歌DeepMind）；NIHR Biomedical Research Centre for Ophthalmology（国立卫生研究院眼科生物医学研究中心）；Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust（摩尔菲尔德眼科医院英国国民保健制度基金会信托）；UCL Institute of Ophthalmology（伦敦大学学院眼科研究所）
Diabetic eye disease is one of the fastest growing causes of preventable blindness. With the advent of anti-VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor) therapies, it has become increasingly important to detect center-involved diabetic macular edema (ci-DME). However, center-involved diabetic macular edema is diagnosed using optical coherence tomography (OCT), which is not generally available at screening sites because of cost and workflow constraints. Instead, screening programs rely on the detection of hard exudates in color fundus photographs as a proxy for DME, often resulting in high false p…
DynSegNet:Dynamic Architecture Adjustment for Adversarial Learning in Segmenting Hemorrhagic Lesions from Fundus Images
School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Information Engineering, Sichuan Agricultural University（四川农业大学信息工程学院）
This paper addresses the problem of identifying two main types of lesions - Exudates and Microaneurysms - caused by Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) in the eyes of diabetic patients. We make use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transfer Learning to locate and generate high-quality segmentation mask for each instance of the lesion that can be found in the patients' fundus images. We create our normalized database out of e-ophtha EX and e-ophtha MA and tweak Mask R-CNN to detect small lesions. Moreover, we employ data augmentation and the pre-trained weights of ResNet101 to compensate for ou…
Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (Deemed to be University)（锡克沙奥阿努山丹大学（被认定为大学））；ITER, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (Deemed to be University)（锡克沙奥阿努山丹大学（被认定为大学）ITER学院）；Center for the Internet of Things, ITER, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (Deemed to be University)（锡克沙奥阿努山丹大学（被认定为大学）ITER学院物联网中心）
Extracting blood vessels from retinal fundus images plays a decisive role in diagnosing the progression in pertinent diseases. In medical image analysis, vessel extraction is a semantic binary segmentation problem, where blood vasculature needs to be extracted from the background. Here, we present an image enhancement technique based on the morphological preprocessing coupled with a scaled U-net architecture. Despite a relatively less number of trainable network parameters, the scaled version of U-net architecture provides better performance compare to other methods in the domain. We validated…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加利福尼亚大学圣巴巴拉分校）
Fundus photography has routinely been used to document the presence and severity of retinal degenerative diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), glaucoma, and diabetic retinopathy (DR) in clinical practice, for which the fovea and optic disc (OD) are important retinal landmarks. However, the occurrence of lesions, drusen, and other retinal abnormalities during retinal degeneration severely complicates automatic landmark detection and segmentation. Here we propose HBA-U-Net: a U-Net backbone enriched with hierarchical bottleneck attention. The network consists of a novel bottle…
University of Engineering and Technology Taxila（塔克西拉工程技术大学）
Glaucoma is a severe eye disease that is known to deteriorate optic never fibers, causing cup size to increase, which could result in permanent loss of vision. Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness after cataract, but glaucoma being more dangerous as it is not curable. Early diagnoses and treatment of glaucoma can help to slow the progression of glaucoma and its damages. For the detection of glaucoma, the Cup to Disc ratio (CDR) provides significant information. The CDR depends heavily on the accurate segmentation of cup and disc regions. In this paper, we have proposed a modified …
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；INESC TEC；Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto（波尔图大学工程学院）
We propose a pixel color amplification theory and family of enhancement methods to facilitate segmentation tasks on retinal images. Our novel re-interpretation of the image distortion model underlying dehazing theory shows how three existing priors commonly used by the dehazing community and a novel fourth prior are related. We utilize the theory to develop a family of enhancement methods for retinal images, including novel methods for whole image brightening and darkening. We show a novel derivation of the Unsharp Masking algorithm. We evaluate the enhancement methods as a pre-processing step…
Hybrid Approach for Enhancing Lesion Segmentation in Fundus Images
Department of Electrical \& Software Engineering, University of Calgary, Canada.；Department of Computer Science；Physics, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada.；Dept of Ophthalmology \& Visual Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.；Wills Eye Hospital, Philadelphia, USA.；Department of Surgery, University of Calgary, Canada.
Deep learning is quickly becoming the leading methodology for medical image analysis. Given a large medical archive, where each image is associated with a diagnosis, efficient pathology detectors or classifiers can be trained with virtually no expert knowledge about the target pathologies. However, deep learning algorithms, including the popular ConvNets, are black boxes: little is known about the local patterns analyzed by ConvNets to make a decision at the image level. A solution is proposed in this paper to create heatmaps showing which pixels in images play a role in the image-level predic…
International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore（国际信息技术学院（班加罗尔））
Automatic image segmentation is a critical component of medical image analysis, and hence quantifying segmentation performance is crucial. Challenges in medical image segmentation are mainly due to spatial variations of regions to be segmented and imbalance in distribution of classes. Commonly used metrics treat all detected pixels, indiscriminately. However, pixels in smaller segments must be treated differently from pixels in larger segments, as detection of smaller ones aid in early treatment of associated disease and are also easier to miss. To address this, we propose a novel evaluation m…
Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of blindness in working age adults. DR lesions can be challenging to identify in fundus images, and automatic DR detection systems can offer strong clinical value. Of the publicly available labeled datasets for DR, the Indian Diabetic Retinopathy Image Dataset (IDRiD) presents retinal fundus images with pixel-level annotations of four distinct lesions: microaneurysms, hemorrhages, soft exudates and hard exudates. We utilize the HEDNet edge detector to solve a semantic segmentation task on this dataset, and then propose an end-to-end system for pixel…
Detection and Classification of Diabetic Retinopathy using Deep Learning Algorithms for Segmentation to Facilitate Referral Recommendation for Test and Treatment Prediction
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Research Institute of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学可信自主系统研究院）；Shenzhen People’s Hospital（深圳市人民医院）
Hard exudates (HE) is the most specific biomarker for retina edema. Precise HE segmentation is vital for disease diagnosis and treatment, but automatic segmentation is challenged by its large variation of characteristics including size, shape and position, which makes it difficult to detect tiny lesions and lesion boundaries. Considering the complementary features between segmentation and super-resolution tasks, this paper proposes a novel hard exudates segmentation method named SS-MAF with an auxiliary super-resolution task, which brings in helpful detailed features for tiny lesion and bounda…
University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Med-X Research Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学Med-X研究院）；Royal Prince Alfred Hospital（皇家阿尔弗雷德王子医院）
Automated segmentation of the optic cup and disk on retinal fundus images is fundamental for the automated detection / analysis of glaucoma. Traditional segmentation approaches depend heavily upon hand-crafted features and a priori knowledge of the user. As such, these methods are difficult to be adapt to the clinical environment. Recently, deep learning methods based on fully convolutional networks (FCNs) have been successful in resolving segmentation problems. However, the reliance on large annotated training data is problematic when dealing with medical images. If a sufficient amount of ann…
Adaptive Feature Fusion Neural Network for Glaucoma Segmentation on Unseen Fundus Images
International Medical College（国际医学院）；Chongqing Medical University（重庆医科大学）；The First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University（重庆医科大学第一附属医院）；Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR)（前沿人工智能研究中心）；Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局）
University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）；Istanbul Medipol University（伊斯坦布尔梅迪波尔大学）
Accurate segmentation of the optic disc from a retinal image is vital to extracting retinal features that may be highly correlated with retinal conditions such as glaucoma. In this paper, we propose a deep-learning based approach capable of segmenting the optic disc given a high-precision retinal fundus image. Our approach utilizes a UNET-based model with a VGG16 encoder trained on the ImageNet dataset. This study can be distinguished from other studies in the customization made for the VGG16 model, the diversity of the datasets adopted, the duration of disc segmentation, the loss function uti…
TJDR: A High-Quality Diabetic Retinopathy Pixel-Level Annotation Dataset
Tongji University（同济大学）；Tongji Hospital, School of Medicine, Tongji University（同济大学附属同济医院）；Tongji Eye Institute, School of Medicine, Tongji University（同济大学医学院同济眼科研究所）
COMSATS University Islamabad（伊斯兰堡COMSATS大学）；Umeå University（于默奥大学）
U-Net is a widely adopted neural network in the domain of medical image segmentation. Despite its quick embracement by the medical imaging community, its performance suffers on complicated datasets. The problem can be ascribed to its simple feature extracting blocks: encoder/decoder, and the semantic gap between encoder and decoder. Variants of U-Net (such as R2U-Net) have been proposed to address the problem of simple feature extracting blocks by making the network deeper, but it does not deal with the semantic gap problem. On the other hand, another variant UNET++ deals with the semantic gap…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
Despite that deep learning has achieved state-of-the-art performance for medical image segmentation, its success relies on a large set of manually annotated images for training that are expensive to acquire. In this paper, we propose an annotation-efficient learning framework for segmentation tasks that avoids annotations of training images, where we use an improved Cycle-Consistent Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to learn from a set of unpaired medical images and auxiliary masks obtained either from a shape model or public datasets. We first use the GAN to generate pseudo labels for our …
National Institute of Technology Karnataka（卡纳塔克邦国家技术研究所）
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a severe complication of diabetes that can cause permanent blindness. Timely diagnosis and treatment of DR are critical to avoid total loss of vision. Manual diagnosis is time consuming and error-prone. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning based method for automatic screening of retinal fundus images to detect and classify DR based on the severity. The method uses a dual-path configuration of deep neural networks to achieve the objective. In the first step, a modified UNet++ based retinal vessel segmentation is used to create a fundus image that emphasis…
ITER, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (Deemed to be University)（ITER，锡克沙·奥·阿努桑德汉（被视为大学））
In the medical domain, different computer-aided diagnosis systems have been proposed to extract blood vessels from retinal fundus images for the clinical treatment of vascular diseases. Accurate extraction of blood vessels from the fundus images using a computer-generated method can help the clinician to produce timely and accurate reports for the patient suffering from these diseases. In this article, we integrate top-hat based preprocessing approach with fine-tuned B-COSFIRE filter to achieve more accurate segregation of blood vessel pixels from the background. The use of top-hat transformat…
Decoupling Wavelet Sub-bands for Single Source Domain Generalization in Fundus Image Segmentation
Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Radcliffe Department of Medicine, University of Oxford（牛津大学拉德克利夫医学系）；Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford（牛津大学工程科学系）
Image and Pervasive Access Lab, CNRS UMI 2955（图像与普适接入实验室，法国国家科学研究中心 UMI 2955）；Universite Jean Monnet, CNRS, UMR 5516, Laboratoire Hubert Curien（让·莫奈大学，法国国家科学研究中心 UMR 5516，于贝尔·居里安实验室）；Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust, University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学安全、可靠性与信任跨学科中心）；Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Computers and Informatics, Suez Canal University（苏伊士运河大学计算机与信息学院计算机科学系）
The diabetic retinopathy is timely diagonalized through color eye fundus images by experienced ophthalmologists, in order to recognize potential retinal features and identify early-blindness cases. In this paper, it is proposed to extract deep features from the last fully-connected layer of, four different, pre-trained convolutional neural networks. These features are then feeded into a non-linear classifier to discriminate three-class diabetic cases, i.e., normal, exudates, and drusen. Averaged across 1113 color retinal images collected from six publicly available annotated datasets, the deep…
AutoMiSeg: Automatic Medical Image Segmentation via Test-Time Adaptation of Foundation Models
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Brown University（布朗大学）；National Institute of Technology Karnataka（印度卡纳塔克国家理工学院）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；University of Alabama at Birmingham（阿拉巴马大学伯明翰分校）
Retinal image quality assessment is an essential prerequisite for diagnosis of retinal diseases. Its goal is to identify retinal images in which anatomic structures and lesions attracting ophthalmologists' attention most are exhibited clearly and definitely while reject poor quality fundus images. Motivated by this, we mimic the way that ophthalmologists assess the quality of retinal images and propose a method termed SalStructuIQA. First, two salient structures for automated retinal quality assessment. One is the large-size salient structures including optic disc region and exudates in large-…
Kaunas University of Technology（考纳斯理工大学）；Lithuanian University of Health Sciences（立陶宛健康科学大学）
This work aims to research an automatic method for detecting Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) lesions in RGB eye fundus images. For this, we align invasively obtained eye fundus contrast images (the "golden standard" diagnostic) to the RGB ones and use them to hand-annotate the lesions. This is done using our custom-made tool. Using the data, we train and test five different convolutional neural networks: a custom one to classify healthy and AMD-affected eye fundi, and four well-known networks: ResNet50, ResNet101, MobileNetV3, and UNet to segment (localize) the AMD lesions in the affect…
The cup-to-disc ratio (CDR) is one of the most significant indicator for glaucoma diagnosis. Different from the use of costly fully supervised learning formulation with pixel-wise annotations in the literature, this study investigates the feasibility of accurate CDR measurement in fundus images using only tight bounding box supervision. For this purpose, we develop a two-task network named as CDRNet for accurate CDR measurement, one for weakly supervised image segmentation, and the other for bounding-box regression. The weakly supervised image segmentation task is implemented based on generali…
Tecnologico de Monterrey（蒙特雷理工学院）；Hospital Sant Joan de Déu（圣胡安德迪乌斯医院）；Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）；Research Centre for Biomedical Engineering (CREB)（生物医学工程研究中心（CREB））
The retinal vessel network studied through fundus images contributes to the diagnosis of multiple diseases not only found in the eye. The segmentation of this system may help the specialized task of analyzing these images by assisting in the quantification of morphological characteristics. Due to its relevance, several Deep Learning-based architectures have been tested for tackling this problem automatically. However, the impact of loss function selection on the segmentation of the intricate retinal blood vessel system hasn't been systematically evaluated. In this work, we present the comparis…
Universitat Rovira i Virgili（罗维拉-威尔吉利大学）；Kayakalp Hospital（Kayakalp医院）；Sant Joan de Reus University Hospital（雷乌斯圣胡安大学医院）；Bioinformatics Institute（生物信息学研究所）
This paper proposed a retinal image segmentation method based on conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) to segment optic disc. The proposed model consists of two successive networks: generator and discriminator. The generator learns to map information from the observing input (i.e., retinal fundus color image), to the output (i.e., binary mask). Then, the discriminator learns as a loss function to train this mapping by comparing the ground-truth and the predicted output with observing the input image as a condition.Experiments were performed on two publicly available dataset; DRISHT…
Screening for the diagnosis of glaucoma through a fundus image can be determined by the optic cup to disc diameter ratio (CDR), which requires the segmentation of the cup and disc regions. In this paper, we propose two novel approaches, namely Parameter-Shared Branched Network (PSBN) andWeak Region of Interest Model-based segmentation (WRoIM) to identify disc and cup boundaries. Unlike the previous approaches, the proposed methods are trained end-to-end through a single neural network architecture and use dynamic cropping instead of manual or traditional computer vision-based cropping. We are …
Domain Adaptation is a technique to address the lack of massive amounts of labeled data in unseen environments. Unsupervised domain adaptation is proposed to adapt a model to new modalities using solely labeled source data and unlabeled target domain data. Though many image-spaces domain adaptation methods have been proposed to capture pixel-level domain-shift, such techniques may fail to maintain high-level semantic information for the segmentation task. For the case of biomedical images, fine details such as blood vessels can be lost during the image transformation operations between domains…
