Leveraging Regular Fundus Images for Training UWF Fundus Diagnosis Models via Adversarial Learning and Pseudo-Labeling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach using adversarial learning and pseudo-labeling to leverage regular fundus images for training ultra-widefield (UWF) fundus diagnosis models, reducing the need for extensive UWF annotations.

Contribution

It proposes a modified CycleGAN with a consistency regularization term to generate UWF images from regular fundus images without paired data, enhancing training efficiency for UWF diagnosis models.

Findings

Improved performance in diabetic retinopathy classification

Enhanced lesion detection accuracy

Better segmentation of tessellated fundus features

Abstract

Recently, ultra-widefield (UWF) 200\degree~fundus imaging by Optos cameras has gradually been introduced because of its broader insights for detecting more information on the fundus than regular 30 degree - 60 degree fundus cameras. Compared with UWF fundus images, regular fundus images contain a large amount of high-quality and well-annotated data. Due to the domain gap, models trained by regular fundus images to recognize UWF fundus images perform poorly. Hence, given that annotating medical data is labor intensive and time consuming, in this paper, we explore how to leverage regular fundus images to improve the limited UWF fundus data and annotations for more efficient training. We propose the use of a modified cycle generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) model to bridge the gap between regular and UWF fundus and generate additional UWF fundus images for training. A consistency regularization term is proposed in the loss of the GAN to improve and regulate the quality of the generated data. Our method does not require that images from the two domains be paired or even that the semantic labels be the same, which provides great convenience for data collection. Furthermore, we show that our method is robust to noise and errors introduced by the generated unlabeled data with the pseudo-labeling technique. We evaluated the effectiveness of our methods on several common fundus diseases and tasks, such as diabetic retinopathy (DR) classification, lesion detection and tessellated fundus segmentation. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method simultaneously achieves superior generalizability of the learned representations and performance improvements in multiple tasks.