Modified U-Net architecture for semantic segmentation of diabetic retinopathy images

Segmentation of lesions from fundus images is an essential prerequisite for accurate severity assessment of diabetic retinopathy. Due to variation in morphologies, number and size of lesions, the manual grading process becomes extremely challenging and time-consuming. This necessitates the need of an automatic segmentation system that can precisely define the region of interest boundaries and assist ophthalmologists in speedy diagnosis along with diabetic retinopathy severity grading. The paper presents a modified U-Net architecture based on residual network and employs periodic shuffling with sub-pixel convolution initialized to convolution nearest neighbour resize. The proposed architecture has been trained and validated for microaneurysm and hard exudate segmentation on two publicly available datasets namely IDRiD and e-ophtha. For IDRiD dataset, the network obtains 99.88% accuracy, 99.85% sensitivity, 99.95% specificity and dice score of 0.9998 for both microaneurysm and exudate segmentation. Further, when trained on e-ophtha and validated on IDRiD dataset, the network shows 99.98% accuracy, 99.88% sensitivity, 99.89% specificity and dice score of 0.9998 for microaneurysm segmentation. For exudates segmentation, the model obtained 99.98% accuracy, 99.88% sensitivity, 99.89% specificity and dice score of 0.9999, when trained on e-ophtha and validated on IDRiD dataset. In comparison to existing literature, the proposed model provides state-of-the-art results for retinal lesion segmentation. (C) 2020 Nalecz Institute of Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.