Optical Disc Segmentation from Retinal Fundus Images Using Deep Learning

The optical disc in the human retina can reveal important information about a person's health and well-being. We propose a deep learning-based approach to automatically identify the region in human retinal images that corresponds to the optical disc. We formulated the task as an image segmentation problem that leverages multiple public-domain datasets of human retinal fundus images. Using an attention-based residual U-Net, we showed that the optical disc in a human retina image can be detected with more than 99% pixel-level accuracy and around 95% in Matthew's Correlation Coefficient. A comparison with variants of UNet with different encoder CNN architectures ascertains the superiority of the proposed approach across multiple metrics.