Multiple Lesions Insertion: boosting diabetic retinopathy screening through Poisson editing

Abstract

Deep neural networks have made incredible progress in many computer vision tasks, owing to access to a great amount of data. However, collecting ground truth for large medical image datasets is extremely inconvenient and difficult to implement in practical applications, due to high professional requirements. Synthesizing can generate meaningful supplement samples to enlarge the insufficient medical image dataset. In this study, we propose a new data augmentation method, Multiple Lesions Insertion (MLI), to simulate new diabetic retinopathy (DR) fundus images based on the healthy fundus images that insert real lesions, such as exudates, hemorrhages, microaneurysms templates, into new healthy fundus images with Poisson editing. The synthetic fundus images can be generated according to the clinical rules, i.e., in different DR grading fundus images, the number of exudates, hemorrhages, microaneurysms are different. The generated DR fundus images by our MLI method are realistic with the real texture features and rich details, without black spots, artifacts, and discontinuities. We first demonstrate the feasibility of this method in a DR computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system, which judges whether the patient has transferred treatment or not. Our results indicate that the MLI method outperforms most of the traditional augmentation methods, i.e, oversampling, under-sampling, cropping, rotation, and adding other real sample methods in the DR screening task.