Microaneurysm detection in fundus images based on a novel end-to-end convolutional neural network

Microaneurysms are the earliest symptom of diabetic retinopathy and play an important role in the screening of diabetic retinopathy. However, because of the complex background, automatic detection microaneurysm in fundus images is a challenging task. Firstly, motivated by the characteristics of microaneurysm, a novel deep convolutional encoder-decoder network for microaneurysm detection is designed to locate the MAs by the differences between the skip connection in the network. Then, a weighted dice loss, termed the smooth dice loss, is presented to put more focus on misclassified microaneurysms. Finally, an activation function with a long tail is used to produce an accurate probability map for MA detection. Plenty of experiments, conducted on the Retinopathy Online Challenge data-set and the e-ophtha-MA dataset, demonstrate that the proposed model achieves the comparable performance to the existing state-of-the-art methods on microaneurysm detection with only one-hundredth the running time compared with its counterparts. The proposed method is simple and effective, guarantees the performance while shortening the test time. It indicates the potential application in the auxiliary diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy screening.

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Opracowanie rekordu ze środków MNiSW, umowa Nr 461252 w ramach programu "Społeczna odpowiedzialność nauki" - moduł: Popularyzacja nauki i promocja sportu (2021).