Retinal Image Enhancement Using Cycle-Constraint Adversarial Network

Retinal images are the most intuitive medical images for the diagnosis of fundus diseases. Low-quality retinal images cause difficulties in computer-aided diagnosis systems and the clinical diagnosis of ophthalmologists. The high quality of retinal images is an important basis of precision medicine...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cheng Wan, Xueting Zhou, Qijing You, Jing Sun, Jianxin Shen, Shaojun Zhu, Qin Jiang, Weihua Yang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-01-01
Series:Frontiers in Medicine
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Online Access:https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.793726/full
Description
Summary:Retinal images are the most intuitive medical images for the diagnosis of fundus diseases. Low-quality retinal images cause difficulties in computer-aided diagnosis systems and the clinical diagnosis of ophthalmologists. The high quality of retinal images is an important basis of precision medicine in ophthalmology. In this study, we propose a retinal image enhancement method based on deep learning to enhance multiple low-quality retinal images. A generative adversarial network is employed to build a symmetrical network, and a convolutional block attention module is introduced to improve the feature extraction capability. The retinal images in our dataset are sorted into two sets according to their quality: low and high quality. Generators and discriminators alternately learn the features of low/high-quality retinal images without the need for paired images. We analyze the proposed method both qualitatively and quantitatively on public datasets and a private dataset. The study results demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to other advanced algorithms, especially in enhancing color-distorted retinal images. It also performs well in the task of retinal vessel segmentation. The proposed network effectively enhances low-quality retinal images, aiding ophthalmologists and enabling computer-aided diagnosis in pathological analysis. Our method enhances multiple types of low-quality retinal images using a deep learning network.
ISSN:2296-858X