Abstract
In medical image analysis applications, the availability of the large amounts of annotated data is becoming increasingly critical. However, annotated medical data is often scarce and costly to obtain. In this paper, we address the problem of synthesizing retinal color images by applying recent techniques based on adversarial learning. In this setting, a generative model is trained to maximize a loss function provided by a second model attempting to classify its output into real or synthetic. In particular, we propose to implement an adversarial autoencoder for the task of retinal vessel network synthesis. We use the generated vessel trees as an intermediate stage for the generation of color retinal images, which is accomplished with a generative adversarial network. Both models require the optimization of almost everywhere differentiable loss functions, which allows us to train them jointly. The resulting model offers an end-to-end retinal image synthesis system capable of generating as many retinal images as the user requires, with their corresponding vessel networks, by sampling from a simple probability distribution that we impose to the associated latent space. We show that the learned latent space contains a well-defined semantic structure, implying that we can perform calculations in the space of retinal images, e.g., smoothly interpolating new data points between two retinal images. Visual and quantitative results demonstrate that the synthesized images are substantially different from those in the training set, while being also anatomically consistent and displaying a reasonable visual quality.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Late diagnoses of patients affected by pulmonary artery hypertension (PH) have a poor outcome. This observation has led to a call for earlier, non-invasive PH detection. Cardiac auscultation offers a non-invasive and cost-effective alternative to both right heart catheterization and doppler analysis in analysis of PH. We propose to detect PH via analysis of digital heart sound recordings with over-parameterized deep neural networks. In contrast with previous approaches in the literature, we assess the impact of a pre-processing step aiming to separate S2 sound into the aortic (A2) and pulmonary (P2) components. We obtain an area under the ROC curve of. 95, improving over our adaptation of a state-of-the-art Gaussian mixture model PH detector by +.17. Post-hoc explanations and analysis show that the availability of separated A2 and P2 components contributes significantly to prediction. Analysis of stethoscope heart sound recordings with deep networks is an effective, low-cost and non-invasive solution for the detection of pulmonary hypertension.