Towards Accurate Segmentation of Retinal Vessels and the Optic Disc in Fundoscopic Images with Generative Adversarial Networks

Automatic segmentation of the retinal vasculature and the optic disc is a crucial task for accurate geometric analysis and reliable automated diagnosis. In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have shown outstanding performance compared to the conventional approaches in the segmentation tasks. In this paper, we experimentally measure the performance gain for Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) framework when applied to the segmentation tasks. We show that GAN achieves statistically significant improvement in area under the receiver operating characteristic (AU-ROC) and area under the precision and recall curve (AU-PR) on two public datasets (DRIVE, STARE) by segmenting fine vessels. Also, we found a model that surpassed the current state-of-the-art method by 0.2 - 1.0% in AU-ROC and 0.8 - 1.2% in AU-PR and 0.5 - 0.7% in dice coefficient. In contrast, significant improvements were not observed in the optic disc segmentation task on DRIONS-DB, RIM-ONE (r3) and Drishti-GS datasets in AU-ROC and AU-PR.