Retinal microaneurysm detection using clinical report guided multi-sieving CNN

Abstract

Timely detection and treatment of microaneurysms (MA) is a critical step to prevent the development of vision-threatening eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy. However, detecting MAs in fundus images is a highly challenging task due to the large variation of imaging conditions. In this paper, we focus on developing an interleaved deep mining technique to cope intelligently with the unbalanced MA detection problem. Specifically, we present a clinical report guided multi-sieving convolutional neural network (MS-CNN) which leverages a small amount of supervised information in clinical reports to identify the potential MA regions via a text-to-image mapping in the feature space. These potential MA regions are then interleaved with the fundus image information for multi-sieving deep mining in a highly unbalanced classification problem. Critically, the clinical reports are employed to bridge the semantic gap between low-level image features and high-level diagnostic information. Extensive evaluations show our framework achieves 99.7% precision and 87.8% recall, comparing favorably with the state-of-the-art algorithms. Integration of expert domain knowledge and image information demonstrates the feasibility to reduce the training difficulty of the classifiers under extremely unbalanced data distribution.