Automatic detection of non-perfusion areas in diabetic macular edema from fundus fluorescein angiography for decision making using deep learning

Vision loss caused by diabetic macular edema (DME) can be prevented by early detection and laser photocoagulation. As there is no comprehensive detection technique to recognize NPA, we proposed an automatic detection method of NPA on fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) in DME. The study included 3,014 FFA images of 221 patients with DME. We use 3 convolutional neural networks (CNNs), including DenseNet, ResNet50, and VGG16, to identify non-perfusion regions (NP), microaneurysms, and leakages in FFA images. The NPA was segmented using attention U-net. To validate its performance, we applied our detection algorithm on 249 FFA images in which the NPA areas were manually delineated by 3 ophthalmologists. For DR lesion classification, area under the curve is 0.8855 for NP regions, 0.9782 for microaneurysms, and 0.9765 for leakage classifier. The average precision of NP region overlap ratio is 0.643. NP regions of DME in FFA images are identified based a new automated deep learning algorithm. This study is an in-depth study from computer-aided diagnosis to treatment, and will be the theoretical basis for the application of intelligent guided laser.