Weakly Supervised Lesion Detection From Fundus Images

Early diagnosis and continuous monitoring of patients suffering from eye diseases have been major concerns in the computer-aided detection techniques. Detecting one or several specific types of retinal lesions has made a significant breakthrough in computer-aided screen in the past few decades. However, due to the variety of retinal lesions and complex normal anatomical structures, automatic detection of lesions with unknown and diverse types from a retina remains a challenging task. In this paper, a weakly supervised method, requiring only a series of normal and abnormal retinal images without need to specifically annotate their locations and types, is proposed for this task. Specifically, a fundus image is understood as a superposition of background, blood vessels, and background noise (lesions included for abnormal images). Background is formulated as a low-rank structure after a series of simple preprocessing steps, including spatial alignment, color normalization, and blood vessels removal. Background noise is regarded as stochastic variable and modeled through Gaussian for normal images and mixture of Gaussian for abnormal images, respectively. The proposed method encodes both the background knowledge of fundus images and the background noise into one unique model, and corporately optimizes the model using normal and abnormal images, which fully depict the low-rank subspace of the background and distinguish the lesions from the background noise in abnormal fundus images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is of fine arts accuracy and outperforms the previous related methods.