Abstract:Fundus Fluorescein Angiography (FFA) is a critical tool for assessing retinal vascular dynamics and aiding in the diagnosis of eye diseases. However, its invasive nature and less accessibility compared to Color Fundus (CF) images pose significant challenges. Current CF to FFA translation methods are limited to static generation. In this work, we pioneer dynamic FFA video generation from static CF images. We introduce an autoregressive GAN for smooth, memory-saving frame-by-frame FFA synthesis. To enhance the focus on dynamic lesion changes in FFA regions, we design a knowledge mask based on clinical experience. Leveraging this mask, our approach integrates innovative knowledge mask-guided techniques, including knowledge-boosted attention, knowledge-aware discriminators, and mask-enhanced patchNCE loss, aimed at refining generation in critical areas and addressing the pixel misalignment challenge. Our method achieves the best FVD of 1503.21 and PSNR of 11.81 compared to other common video generation approaches. Human assessment by an ophthalmologist confirms its high generation quality. Notably, our knowledge mask surpasses supervised lesion segmentation masks, offering a promising non-invasive alternative to traditional FFA for research and clinical applications. The code is available at https://github.com/Michi-3000/Fundus2Video.
Abstract:Artificial intelligence (AI) is vital in ophthalmology, tackling tasks like diagnosis, classification, and visual question answering (VQA). However, existing AI models in this domain often require extensive annotation and are task-specific, limiting their clinical utility. While recent developments have brought about foundation models for ophthalmology, they are limited by the need to train separate weights for each imaging modality, preventing a comprehensive representation of multi-modal features. This highlights the need for versatile foundation models capable of handling various tasks and modalities in ophthalmology. To address this gap, we present EyeFound, a multimodal foundation model for ophthalmic images. Unlike existing models, EyeFound learns generalizable representations from unlabeled multimodal retinal images, enabling efficient model adaptation across multiple applications. Trained on 2.78 million images from 227 hospitals across 11 ophthalmic modalities, EyeFound facilitates generalist representations and diverse multimodal downstream tasks, even for detecting challenging rare diseases. It outperforms previous work RETFound in diagnosing eye diseases, predicting systemic disease incidents, and zero-shot multimodal VQA. EyeFound provides a generalizable solution to improve model performance and lessen the annotation burden on experts, facilitating widespread clinical AI applications for retinal imaging.