DR-GAN: Conditional Generative Adversarial Network for Fine-Grained Lesion Synthesis on Diabetic Retinopathy Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces DR-GAN, a conditional generative adversarial network that synthesizes high-resolution, controllable diabetic retinopathy fundus images to enhance data diversity and improve grading model performance.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel DR-GAN model that generates realistic, high-resolution fundus images with controllable grading and lesion features, aiding in data augmentation for DR analysis.

Findings

Synthesizes highly realistic 1280x1280 fundus images.

Improves DR grading accuracy with augmented data.

Effective across multiple datasets, including EyePACS and FGADR.

Abstract

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a complication of diabetes that severely affects eyes. It can be graded into five levels of severity according to international protocol. However, optimizing a grading model to have strong generalizability requires a large amount of balanced training data, which is difficult to collect particularly for the high severity levels. Typical data augmentation methods, including random flipping and rotation, cannot generate data with high diversity. In this paper, we propose a diabetic retinopathy generative adversarial network (DR-GAN) to synthesize high-resolution fundus images which can be manipulated with arbitrary grading and lesion information. Thus, large-scale generated data can be used for more meaningful augmentation to train a DR grading and lesion segmentation model. The proposed retina generator is conditioned on the structural and lesion masks, as well as adaptive grading vectors sampled from the latent grading space, which can be adopted to control the synthesized grading severity. Moreover, a multi-scale spatial and channel attention module is devised to improve the generation ability to synthesize details. Multi-scale discriminators are designed to operate from large to small receptive fields, and joint adversarial losses are adopted to optimize the whole network in an end-to-end manner. With extensive experiments evaluated on the EyePACS dataset connected to Kaggle, as well as the FGADR dataset, we validate the effectiveness of our method, which can both synthesize highly realistic (1280 x 1280) controllable fundus images and contribute to the DR grading task.