# Synthesizing New Retinal Symptom Images by Multiple Generative Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04147 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04147/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [The Dawn of Quantum Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06510/) (2021)
- [GPT2MVS: Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2 for Multi-modal Video Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12465/) (2021)
- [Contextualized Keyword Representations for Multi-modal Retinal Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12471/) (2021)
- [Longer Version for "Deep Context-Encoding Network for Retinal Image Captioning"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14538/) (2021)
- [Query-based Video Summarization with Pseudo Label Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01945/) (2023)
- [A Novel Evaluation Framework for Image2Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01723/) (2024)
- [Improving Visual Question Answering Models through Robustness Analysis and In-Context Learning with a Chain of Basic Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03147/) (2023)
- [LAFFNet: A Lightweight Adaptive Feature Fusion Network for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01299/) (2021)
- [Causalainer: Causal Explainer for Automatic Video Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00455/) (2023)
- [Conditional Modeling Based Automatic Video Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12159/) (2023)
- [Optimizing Numerical Estimation and Operational Efficiency in the Legal Domain through Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19041/) (2024)
- [Causal Video Summarizer for Video Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01947/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Retinal Image Generation and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08339/) (2023)
- [DeepEyeNet: Generating Medical Report for Retinal Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12534/) (2025)
- [A Novel Automatic Framework for Speaker Drift Detection in Synthesized Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06327/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is an asymptomatic retinal disease which may result in loss of vision. There is limited access to high-quality relevant retinal images and poor understanding of the features defining sub-classes of this disease. Motivated by recent advances in machine learning we specifically explore the potential of generative modeling, using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and style transferring, to facilitate clinical diagnosis and disease understanding by feature extraction. We design an analytic pipeline which first generates synthetic retinal images from clinical images; a subsequent verification step is applied. In the synthesizing step we merge GANs (DCGANs and WGANs architectures) and style transferring for the image generation, whereas the verified step controls the accuracy of the generated images. We find that the generated images contain sufficient pathological details to facilitate ophthalmologists' task of disease classification and in discovery of disease relevant features. In particular, our system predicts the drusen and geographic atrophy sub-classes of AMD. Furthermore, the performance using CFP images for GANs outperforms the classification based on using only the original clinical dataset. Our results are evaluated using existing classifier of retinal diseases and class activated maps, supporting the predictive power of the synthetic images and their utility for feature extraction. Our code examples are available online.