Advancing Retinal Image Segmentation: A Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model Perspective

Retinal images and vessel trees play a crucial role in aiding ophthalmologists to identify and diagnose various illnesses related to the eyes, blood vessels, and brain. However, manual retinal image segmentation is a laborious and highly skilled procedure, posing challenges in terms of both difficulty and time consumption. This study proposes a novel approach to retinal image segmentation, leveraging the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) for precise performance. To our best knowledge, DDPM is being applied in this domain for the first time. Our approach incorporates a novel constraint to prevent DDPM from generating vessel structures that not present in the original retinal images during the segmentation process. Additionally, our model is not limited to the original DDPM size of 64 x 64 pixels. Instead, we train it to effectively segment images sized 256 x 256 pixels. This is a significant advancement since the original DDPM works exclusively with 64x64 image sizes and is primarily designed for generating random image samples. In our work, we address both limitations with a novel, efficient approach for accurate retinal image segmentation. A comprehensive evaluation of our methodology includes both quantitative and qualitative assessments. Our proposed method demonstrates competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques, as indicated by both qualitative and quantitative scores. The source code of our method can be accessed at https://github.com/AAleka/DDPM-segmentation.