GAN-Based Approach for Diabetic Retinopathy Retinal Vasculature Segmentation

Bioengineering (Basel). 2023 Dec 21;11(1):4. doi: 10.3390/bioengineering11010004.

Abstract

Most diabetes patients develop a condition known as diabetic retinopathy after having diabetes for a prolonged period. Due to this ailment, damaged blood vessels may occur behind the retina, which can even progress to a stage of losing vision. Hence, doctors advise diabetes patients to screen their retinas regularly. Examining the fundus for this requires a long time and there are few ophthalmologists available to check the ever-increasing number of diabetes patients. To address this issue, several computer-aided automated systems are being developed with the help of many techniques like deep learning. Extracting the retinal vasculature is a significant step that aids in developing such systems. This paper presents a GAN-based model to perform retinal vasculature segmentation. The model achieves good results on the ARIA, DRIVE, and HRF datasets.

Keywords: GAN; deep learning; diabetic retinopathy; fundus images; retinal blood vessel segmentation.

Grants and funding

This research work was made possible by research grant support (IRCC-2023-223) from Qatar University Research Fund in Qatar.