Microaneurysm detection using deep learning and interleaved freezing.

Diabetes affects one in eleven adults. Diabetic retinopathy is a microvascular complication of diabetes and the leading cause of blindness in the working-age population. Microaneurysms are the earliest clinical signs of diabetic retinopathy. This paper proposes an automatic method for detecting microaneurysms in fundus photographies. A novel patch-based fully convolutional neural network for detection of microaneurysms is proposed. Compared to other methods that require five processing stages, it requires only two. Furthermore, a novel network fine-tuning scheme called Interleaved Freezing is presented. This procedure significantly reduces the amount of time needed to re-train a network and produces competitive results. The proposed method was evaluated using publicly available and widely used datasets: E-Ophtha and ROC. It outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of free-response receiver operatic characteristic (FROC) metric. Simplicity, performance, efficiency and robustness of the proposed method demonstrate its suitability for diabetic retinopathy screening applications.