Deep Learning Based Neovascularization Detection in Color Fundus Photography Image

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) has already been one of the leading causes of vision loss. A large number of researches about deep learning-based DR screening using color retinal photography images have been proposed in recent years. However, existing works mainly concentrated on non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy (NPDR) lesions. The exploration of proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) lesion, which is more serious, is still insufficient. In this paper, we explored into one typical PDR lesion named neovascularization (NV). We collected and annotated retinal images from public and private datasets to construct and release a new dataset for NV detection. Three tasks including segmentation, detection, and grading were conducted on our dataset by using a set of state-of-the-art deep learning models. The results show that introducing NV detection can benefit DR grading. However, the segmentation and detection of NV are still challenging and have considerable room for improvement.