Coarse-to-Fine Latent Diffusion Model for Glaucoma Forecast on Sequential Fundus Images

Yuhan Zhang, Kun Huang, Xikai Yang, Xiao Ma, Jian Wu, Ningli Wang, Xi Wang, Pheng-Ann Heng

Abstract: Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of irreversible blindness worldwide. Predicting the future status of glaucoma is essential for early detection and timely intervention of potential patients and avoiding the outcome of blindness. Based on historical fundus images from patients, existing glaucoma forecast methods directly predict the probability of developing glaucoma in the future. In this paper, we propose a novel glaucoma forecast method called Coarse-to-Fine Latent Diffusion Model (C2F-LDM) to generatively predict the possible features at any future time point in the latent space based on sequential fundus images. After obtaining the predicted features, we can detect the probability of developing glaucoma and reconstruct future fundus images for visualization. Since all fundus images in the sequence are sampled at irregular time points, we propose a time-adaptive sequence encoder that encodes the sequential fundus images with their irregular time intervals as the historical condition to guide the latent diffusion model, making the model capable of capturing the status changes of glaucoma over time. Furthermore, a coarse-to-fine diffusion strategy improves the quality of the predicted features. We verify C2F-LDM on the public glaucoma forecast dataset SIGF. C2F-LDM presents better quantitative results than other state-of-the-art forecast methods and provides visual results for qualitative evaluations.