Self-Supervised Rigid Registration for Multimodal Retinal Images

Abstract

The ability to accurately overlay one modality retinal image to another is critical in ophthalmology. Our previous framework achieved the state-of-the-art results for multimodal retinal image registration. However, it requires human-annotated labels due to the supervised approach of the previous work. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised multimodal retina registration method to alleviate the burdens of time and expense to prepare for training data, that is, aiming to automatically register multimodal retinal images without any human annotations. Specially, we focus on registering color fundus images with infrared reflectance and fluorescein angiography images, and compare registration results with several conventional and supervised and unsupervised deep learning methods. From the experimental results, the proposed self-supervised framework achieves a comparable accuracy comparing to the state-of-the-art supervised learning method in terms of registration accuracy and Dice coefficient.