Abstract
Corneal ulcer is a common leading cause of corneal blindness. It is difficult to accurately segment corneal ulcers due to the following problems: large differences in the pathological shapes between point-flaky and flaky corneal ulcers, blurred boundary, noise interference, and the lack of sufficient slit-lamp images with ground truth. To address these problems, in this paper, we proposed a novel semi-supervised multi-scale self-transformer generative adversarial network (Semi-MsST-GAN) that can leverage unlabeled images to improve the performance of corneal ulcer segmentation in fluorescein staining of slit-lamp images. Firstly, to improve the performance of segmenting the corneal ulcer regions with complex pathological features, we proposed a novel multi-scale self-transformer network (MsSTNet) as the MsST-GAN generator, which can guide the model to aggregate the low-level weak semantic features with the high-level strong semantic information and adaptively learn the spatial correlation in feature maps. Then, to further improve the segmentation performance by leveraging unlabeled data, the semi-supervised approach based on the proposed MsST-GAN was explored to solve the problem of the lack of slit-lamp images with corresponding ground truth. The proposed Semi-MsST-GAN was comprehensively evaluated on the public SUSTech-SYSU dataset, which contains 354 labeled and 358 unlabeled fluorescein staining slit-lamp images. The results showed that, compared with other state-of-the-art methods, our proposed method achieves better performance with comparable efficiency.
Highlights
The cornea is a transparent membrane located at the front of the eyeball and is directly exposed to the air
multi-scale self-transformer (MsST)-GAN was compared with other convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods and GAN methods, with 354 labeled images under the supervised condition
The proposed Semi-MsST-GAN was compared with Semi-cGAN, Semi-PIX2PIX, and Semi-Cycle GAN
Summary
The cornea is a transparent membrane located at the front of the eyeball and is directly exposed to the air. It is more likely to be infected with bacteria, resulting in several frequently occurring ophthalmic symptoms such as corneal ulcer. Corneal ulcer is an inflammatory or, more seriously, infective condition of the cornea involving disruption of its stromal–epithelial layers. Semi-MsST-GAN (Bron et al, 2007; Chen and Yuan, 2010). Fluorescein staining is the most widely used diagnostic technology in optometry and ophthalmology to assess the integrity of the ocular surface, the integrity of the cornea (Morgan and Carole, 2009; Zhang et al, 2018). With the development of staining techniques, doctors can quantitatively evaluate the size and severity of corneal ulcers by fluorescein staining of slit-lamp images
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