EAD-Net: A Novel Lesion Segmentation Method in Diabetic Retinopathy Using Neural Networks

Dis Markers. 2021 Sep 1;2021:6482665. doi: 10.1155/2021/6482665. eCollection 2021.ABSTRACTDiabetic retinopathy (DR) is a common chronic fundus disease, which has four different kinds of microvessel structure and microvascular lesions: microaneurysms (MAs), hemorrhages (HEs), hard exudates, and soft exudates. Accurate detection and counting of them are a basic but important work. The manual annotation of these lesions is a labor-intensive task in clinical analysis. To solve the problem, we proposed a novel segmentation method for different lesions in DR. Our method is based on a convolutional neural network and can be divided into encoder module, attention module, and decoder module, so we refer it as EAD-Net. After normalization and augmentation, the fundus images were sent to the EAD-Net for automated feature extraction and pixel-wise label prediction. Given the evaluation metrics based on the matching degree between detected candidates and ground truth lesions, our method achieved sensitivity of 92.77%, specificity of 99.98%, and accuracy of 99.97% on the e_ophtha_EX dataset and comparable AUPR (Area under Precision-Recall curve) scores on IDRiD dataset. Moreover, the results on the local dataset also show that our EAD-Net has better performance than original U-net in most metrics, especially in the sensitivity and F1-score, with nearly ten percent improvement. The proposed EAD-Net is a novel method based on clinical DR diagnosis. It has satisfactory results on the segmenta...
Source: Disease Markers - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Source Type: research