Evaluation of Deep Segmentation Models for the Extraction of Retinal Lesions from Multi-modal Retinal Images

Identification of lesions plays a vital role in the accurate classification of retinal diseases and in helping clinicians analyzing the disease severity. In this paper, we present a detailed evaluation of RAGNet, PSPNet, SegNet, UNet, FCN-8 and FCN-32 for the extraction of retinal lesions such as intra-retinal fluid, sub-retinal fluid, hard exudates, drusen, and other chorioretinal anomalies from retinal fundus and OCT scans. We also discuss the transferability of these models for extracting retinal lesions by varying training-testing dataset pairs. A total of 363 fundus and 173,915 OCT scans were considered in this evaluation from seven publicly available datasets from which 297 fundus and 59,593 OCT scans were used for testing purposes. Overall, the best performance is achieved by RAGNet with a mean dice coefficient ($\mathrm{D_C}$) score of 0.822 for extracting retinal lesions. The second-best performance is achieved by PSPNet (mean $\mathrm{D_C}$: 0.785) using ResNet\textsubscript{50} as a backbone. Moreover, the best performance for extracting drusen is achieved by UNet ($\mathrm{D_C}$: 0.864). The source code is available at: this http URL.