A Two-Stage GAN for High-Resolution Retinal Image Generation and Segmentation

Electronics

Veronica Lachi¹  Giorgio Ciano¹  Caterina Graziani¹  Simone Bonechi¹  Alessandro Mecocci¹  Paolo Andreini¹  Franco Scarselli¹  Monica Bianchini¹  Andrea Sodi² 

[1] Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics, University of Siena, 53100 Siena, Italy;S.O.D. Oculistica, Azienda Ospedaliero Universitaria Careggi, 50134 Firenze, Italy;

关键词: deep learning;    convolutional neural networks;    semantic segmentation;    generative adversarial networks;    retinal images;    image augmentation;   

DOI  :  10.3390/electronics11010060

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

In this paper, we use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to synthesize high-quality retinal images along with the corresponding semantic label-maps, instead of real images during training of a segmentation network. Different from other previous proposals, we employ a two-step approach: first, a progressively growing GAN is trained to generate the semantic label-maps, which describes the blood vessel structure (i.e., the vasculature); second, an image-to-image translation approach is used to obtain realistic retinal images from the generated vasculature. The adoption of a two-stage process simplifies the generation task, so that the network training requires fewer images with consequent lower memory usage. Moreover, learning is effective, and with only a handful of training samples, our approach generates realistic high-resolution images, which can be successfully used to enlarge small available datasets. Comparable results were obtained by employing only synthetic images in place of real data during training. The practical viability of the proposed approach was demonstrated on two well-established benchmark sets for retinal vessel segmentation—both containing a very small number of training samples—obtaining better performance with respect to state-of-the-art techniques.

【 授权许可】

Unknown