Simple Code Implementation for Deep Learning–Based Segmentation to Evaluate Central Serous Chorioretinopathy in Fundus Photography

PURPOSE: Central serous chorioretinopathy (CSC) is a retinal disease that frequently shows resolution and recurrence with serous detachment of the neurosensory retina. Here, we present a deep learning analysis of subretinal fluid (SRF) lesion segmentation in fundus photographs to evaluate CSC. METHODS: We collected 194 fundus photographs of SRF lesions from the patients with CSC. Three graders manually annotated of the entire SRF area in the retinal images. The dataset was randomly separated into training (90%) and validation (10%) datasets. We used the U-Net segmentation model based on conditional generative adversarial networks (pix2pix) to detect the SRF lesions. The algorithms were trained and validated using Google Colaboratory. Researchers did not need prior knowledge of coding skills or computing resources to implement this code. RESULTS: The validation results showed that the Jaccard index and Dice coefficient scores were 0.619 and 0.763, respectively. In most cases, the segmentation results overlapped with most of the reference areas in the annotated images. However, cases with exceptional SRFs were not accurate in terms of prediction. Using Colaboratory, the proposed segmentation task ran easily in a web-based environment without setup or personal computing resources. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that the deep learning model based on U-Net from the pix2pix algorithm is suitable for the automatic segmentation of SRF lesions to evaluate CSC. TRANSLATIONAL RELEVANCE: Our code implementation has the potential to facilitate ophthalmology research; in particular, deep learning–based segmentation can assist in the development of pathological lesion detection solutions.