Synthesizing multi-frame high-resolution fluorescein angiography images from retinal fundus images using generative adversarial networks

BACKGROUND: Fundus fluorescein angiography (FA) can be used to diagnose fundus diseases by observing dynamic fluorescein changes that reflect vascular circulation in the fundus. As FA may pose a risk to patients, generative adversarial networks have been used to convert retinal fundus images into fluorescein angiography images. However, the available methods focus on generating FA images of a single phase, and the resolution of the generated FA images is low, being unsuitable for accurately diagnosing fundus diseases. METHODS: We propose a network that generates multi-frame high-resolution FA images. This network consists of a low-resolution GAN (LrGAN) and a high-resolution GAN (HrGAN), where LrGAN generates low-resolution and full-size FA images with global intensity information, HrGAN takes the FA images generated by LrGAN as input to generate multi-frame high-resolution FA patches. Finally, the FA patches are merged into full-size FA images. RESULTS: Our approach combines supervised and unsupervised learning methods and achieves better quantitative and qualitative results than using either method alone. Structural similarity (SSIM), normalized cross-correlation (NCC) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) were used as quantitative metrics to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results show that our method achieves better quantitative results with structural similarity of 0.7126, normalized cross-correlation of 0.6799, and peak signal-to-noise ratio of 15.77. In addition, ablation experiments also demonstrate that using a shared encoder and residual channel attention module in HrGAN is helpful for the generation of high-resolution images. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, our method has higher performance for generating retinal vessel details and leaky structures in multiple critical phases, showing a promising clinical diagnostic value. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12938-023-01070-6.