Fundus2Angio: A Novel Conditional GAN Architecture for Generating Fluorescein Angiography Images from Retinal Fundus Photography

[Springer][Arxiv]

Abstract

Carrying out clinical diagnosis of retinal vascular degeneration using Fluorescein Angiography (FA) is a time consuming process and can pose significant adverse effects on the patient. Angiography requires insertion of a dye that may cause severe adverse effects and can even be fatal. Currently, there are no non-invasive systems capable of generating Fluorescein Angiography images. However, retinal fundus photography is anon-invasive imaging technique that can be completed in a few seconds. In order to eliminate the need for FA, we propose a conditional generative adversarial network (GAN)to translate fundus images to FA images. The proposed GAN consists of a novel residual block capable of generating high quality FA images. These images are important tools in the differential diagnosis of retinal diseases without the need for invasive procedure with possible side effects. Our experiments show that the proposed architecture outperforms other state-of-the-art generative networks. Furthermore, our proposed model achieves better qualitative results indistinguishable from real angiograms.