Optic Disc and Cup Image Segmentation Utilizing Contour-Based Transformation and Sequence Labeling Networks

Optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) segmentation are important steps for automatic screening and diagnosing of optic nerve head abnormalities such as glaucoma. Many recent works formulated the OD and OC segmentation as a pixel classification task. However, it is hard for these methods to explicitly model the spatial relations between the labels in the output mask. Furthermore, the proportion of the background, OD and OC are unbalanced which also may result in a biased model as well as introduce more noise. To address these problems, we developed an approach that follows a coarse-to-fine segmentation process. We start with a U-Net to obtain a rough segmenting boundary and then crop the area around the boundary to form a boundary contour centered image. Second, inspired by sequence labeling tasks in natural language processing, we regard the OD and OC segmentation as a sequence labeling task and propose a novel fully convolutional network called SU-Net and combine it with the Viterbi algorithm to jointly decode the segmentation boundary. We also introduced a geometric parameter-based data augmentation method to generate more training samples in order to minimize the differences between training and test sets and reduce overfitting. Experimental results show that our method achieved state-of-the-art results on 2 datasets for both OD and OC segmentation and our method outperforms most of the ophthalmologists in terms of achieving agreement out of 6 ophthalmologists on the MESSIDOR dataset for both OD and OC segmentation. In terms of glaucoma screening, we achieved the best cup-to-disc ratio (CDR) error and area under the ROC curve (AUC) for glaucoma classification on the Drishti-GS dataset.