Neovascularization Detection and Localization in Fundus Images Using Deep Learning

Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy (PDR) is a severe retinal disease that threatens diabetic patients. It is characterized by neovascularization in the retina and the optic disk. PDR clinical features contain highly intense retinal neovascularization and fibrous spreads, leading to visual distortion if not controlled. Different image processing techniques have been proposed to detect and diagnose neovascularization from fundus images. Recently, deep learning methods are getting popular in neovascularization detection due to artificial intelligence advancement in biomedical image processing. This paper presents a semantic segmentation convolutional neural network architecture for neovascularization detection. First, image pre-processing steps were applied to enhance the fundus images. Then, the images were divided into small patches, forming a training set, a validation set, and a testing set. A semantic segmentation convolutional neural network was designed and trained to detect the neovascularization regions on the images. Finally, the network was tested using the testing set for performance evaluation. The proposed model is entirely automated in detecting and localizing neovascularization lesions, which is not possible with previously published methods. Evaluation results showed that the model could achieve accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, Jaccard similarity, and Dice similarity of 0.9948, 0.8772, 0.9976, 0.8696, 0.7643, and 0.8466, respectively. We demonstrated that this model could outperform other convolutional neural network models in neovascularization detection.