Deep Learning Based Approach for Optic Disc and Optic Cup Semantic Segmentation for Glaucoma Analysis in Retinal Fundus Images Original Scientific Paper

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Deep Learning Based Approach for Optic Disc and Optic Cup Semantic Segmentation for Glaucoma Analysis in Retinal Fundus Images Original Scientific Paper Deep learning based approach for optic disc and optic cup semantic segmentation for glaucoma analysis in retinal fundus images Original Scientific Paper Dunja Božić-Štulić University of Split, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture Ruđera Boškovića 32, Split, Croatia [email protected] Maja Braović University of Split, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture Ruđera Boškovića 32, Split, Croatia [email protected] Darko Stipaničev University of Split, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture Ruđera Boškovića 32, Split, Croatia [email protected] Abstract – Optic disc and optic cup are one of the most recognized retinal landmarks, and there are numerous methods for their automatic detection. Segmented optic disc and optic cup are useful in providing the contextual information about the retinal image that can aid in the detection of other retinal features, but it is also useful in the automatic detection and monitoring of glaucoma. This paper proposes a deep learning based approach for the automatic optic disc and optic cup semantic segmentation, but also the new model for possible glaucoma detection. The proposed method was trained on DRIVE and DIARETDB1 image datasets and evaluated on MESSIDOR dataset, where it achieved the average accuracy of 97.3% of optic disc and 88.1% of optic cup. Detection rate of glaucoma diesis is 96.75%. Keywords – optic disc, optic cup, glaucoma, deep learning 1. INTRODUCTION increased intraocular pressure that can lead to vision loss if left untreated. Medical tests for glaucoma should, Optic disc and optic cup are one of the most recog- amongst other things, include measurement of change nized retinal landmarks, alongside fovea, macula and in the cup-to-disc (CDR) ratio, and this ratio can be cal- retinal blood vessels. It is a point of convergence for culated automatically (e.g. [6, 7]) given the segmented retinal blood vessels, and in a fundus image that shows optic cup and optic disc from retinal fundus image. The no abnormalities is usually represented by the bright- focus of this paper is on the automatic optic disc seg- est region in the image, A large number of methods for mentation and optic cup segmentation. Our method its automatic detection is reported in the literature (e.g. is based on popular SegNet [8] deep neural network, [1-5]), but approaches based on deep learning, such as which is originally used for semantic segmentation of the one proposed in paper, are still relatively novel. It natural landscape images. SegNet belongs to encoder- can be used in the automatic segmentation of retinal decoder type of deep architecture for multi-class pixel- blood vessels, fovea and macula, as it can provide con- wise segmentation. textual information about the retinal image. It is also This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2. we useful in the automatic detection and monitoring of discuss related work, with special attention being given glaucoma, and eye disease usually characterized by an to optic disc segmentation methods that are based on Volume 11, Number 2, 2020 111 deep learning. In Section 3. we give an overview of the proaches can be found in [11, 13, 14, 15]. Methods that proposed method, including data preparation process are used for blood vessels removal from fundus images and network architecture description. In Section 4. we are numerous, and some examples would be morpho- present and discuss optic disc and cup segmentation logical closing [11] and local entropy thresholding and in- results obtained with the proposed method, as a glau- painting techniques [13]. Other approaches for automatic coma detection rate. In Section 5. we give a conclusion optic disc segmentation do not remove blood vessels and discuss future work. from fundus images, but rather use the fact that the optic disc is a point of convergence for retinal blood vessels in 2. RELATED WORK automatic optic disc segmentation. Examples of these ap- proaches can be found in [1, 16]. In this section of the paper we discuss existing meth- ods for optic disc segmentation and optic cup segmen- When it comes to image enhancement for optic disk tation. segmentation, various techniques can be used. For ex- ample, illumination equalization was used in [1], aniso- 2.1. OPTIC DISC SEGMENTATION tropic diffusion was used in [17], median filter of size 15x15 pixels was used in [4], and averaging filter of size Approaches for automatic optic disc segmentation 25x35 pixels was used in [18]. span a great number of categories, and since these cat- egories are usually intertwined, it makes it difficult to Methods used for automatic optic disc detection categorize these approaches into fixed categories. For encompass a wide range of different techniques that this reason, in this section of the paper we discuss vari- range from template matching (e.g. [19] (the authors ous techniques that are commonly used in automatic used histograms instead of images for templates) and optic disc segmentation. Special attention is given to [45] (the authors used template matching for optic disc novel automatic optic disc segmentation approaches centre detection)) to algorithms inspired by biological that are based on deep learning. organisms (e.g. firefly algorithm in [4] and ant colony optimization algorithm in [17]). Automatic optic disc segmentation methods usually consist of a preprocessing part and the main segmen- Methods for automatic optic disc detection that are tation part. Preprocessing part commonly encompass- based on deep learning are still relatively novel. Exist- es the selection of the appropriate color space or color ing methods that use deep learning for automatic op- channel in which to perform further analysis, removal tic disk segmentation, localization and/or detection of retinal blood vessels from fundus images, and vari- include [8, 21, 22]. ous techniques for image enhancement. The main seg- Approaches for automatic optic disc segmentation mentation part commonly consists of a combination can be trained and evaluated on various fundus image of various image processing techniques, for example datasets. In this paper we decided to train the proposed mathematical morphology, edge detection, different method on DRIVE (Digital Retinal Images for Vessel Ex- classifiers, etc. traction) [23, 24] and DIARETDB1 (Diabetic Retinopathy One of the usual first steps in the preprocessing part Database) [25, 26] image datasets. DRIVE consists of 40 of automatic optic disc detection methods is the se- fundus images equally split into training and testing cat- lection of optimal color space or color channel to use. egories. For the purposes of this paper, we used all 40 We found that various approaches use different color images for the testing purpose, as it is commonly done channels. For example, green channel from the RGB when it comes to evaluation of automatic optic disc color space was used in [9, 10], both green and red segmentation approaches. The size of the images in the channels from the RGB color space were used in [11], DRIVE dataset is 565x584 pixels. DIARETDB1 consists of and in [12] it was found that it was reliable to use lumi- 89 fundus images whose size is 1500x1152 pixels. Since nance channel from the HLS color space for optic disc there are no formal ground truth segmentations of the localization and red channel from the RGB color space optic disc for neither of these two image datasets, we to find the contours of the optic disc. From this we can created our own optic disc manual segmentations for conclude that there is no formal agreement between both of them. The proposed method was evaluated on researchers on what color space or color channel to use 200 images from the MESSIDOR image dataset [44]. in automatic optic disc segmentation. Our contributions in this work are: Another important step that is often used in the prepro- We proposed a novel fully automatic model for de- cessing part of automatic optic disc detection methods is tecting glaucoma disease based on deep learning ap- the removal of retinal blood vessels from fundus images. proach. Model preforms semantic segmentation of op- Retinal blood vessels are usually removed from fundus tic disc and optic cup respectively. images because they intersect the boundary of the op- tic disc, making it more difficult to detect it. In order to 2.2. OPTIC CUP SEGMENTATION compensate for this situation, many automatic optic disc segmentation approaches employ the removal of retinal Automatic optic cup segmentation is usually associ- blood vessels from fundus images. Examples of these ap- ated with automated glaucoma detection and analysis. 112 International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering Systems Image processing based glaucoma detection has been that are in the top 20% from the segmented optic disc studied in the literature (e.g. [3]), and they usually work region. Lim et al. [8] proposed a method for optic cup by calculating the CDR ratio. In this section of the paper segmentation that. In [13] authors proposed a method we will briefly discuss some of the methods used for for optic cup segmentation that includes an over-seg- automatic, image processing based optic cup segmen- mentation of the optic disc region into superpixels, ex- tation. traction of features belonging to these superpixels, and the classification procedure (by using the SVM classi- Akram et al. [3] proposed a method for optic cup seg- fier) that determines if the superpixel belongs to the mentation that selects pixels that have intensity values optic cup or not. Fig. 1. Flow chart of proposed method for detecting glaucoma 3. PROPOSED METHOD 3.1. OVEr-SEGMENTATION OF THE fUNDUS IMAGES Fig. 1. illustrates the proposed method and is com- posed of three phases. Phase one, the image is Segmentation is one of the most complex computer vision.
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