Pathology-aware deep network visualization and its application in glaucoma image synthesis

Abstract

The past few years have witnessed the great success of applying deep neural networks (DNNs) in computer-aided diagnosis. However, little attention has been paid to provide pathological evidence in the existing DNNs for medical diagnosis. In fact, feature visualization in DNNs is able to help understanding how the computer make decisions, and thus it shows promise on finding pathological evidence from computer-aided diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a novel pathology-aware visualization approach for DNN-based glaucoma classification, which is used to locate the pathological evidence from fundus images for glaucoma. Besides, we apply the visualization framework to the glaucoma images synthesis task, through which specific pathological areas of synthesized images can be enhanced. Finally, experimental results show that the visualization heat maps can pinpoint different glaucoma pathologies with high accuracy, and that the generated glaucoma images are more pathophysiologically clear in rim loss (RL) and retinal neural fiber layer damage (RNFLD), which is verified by the ophthalmologist.