Zoom-in-net: Deep mining lesions for diabetic retinopathy detection

Abstract

We propose a convolution neural network based algorithm for simultaneously diagnosing diabetic retinopathy and highlighting suspicious regions. Our contributions are two folds: (1) a network termed Zoom-in-Net which mimics the zoom-in process of a clinician to examine the retinal images. Trained with only image-level supervisions, Zoom-in-Net can generate attention maps which highlight suspicious regions, and predicts the disease level accurately based on both the whole image and its high resolution suspicious patches. (2) Only four bounding boxes generated from the automatically learned attention maps are enough to cover 80% of the lesions labeled by an experienced ophthalmologist, which shows good localization ability of the attention maps. By clustering features at high response locations on the attention maps, we discover meaningful clusters which contain potential lesions in diabetic retinopathy. Experiments show that our algorithm outperform the state-of-the-art methods on two datasets, EyePACS and Messidor.