Open Access

ARTICLE

Enhancement of Medical Imaging Technique for Diabetic Retinopathy: Realistic Synthetic Image Generation Using GenAI

Damodharan Palaniappan¹, Tan Kuan Tak², K. Vijayan³, Balajee Maram⁴, Pravin R Kshirsagar⁵, Naim Ahmad^6,*

1 Department of Information Technology, Marwadi University, Rajkot, 360003, India
2 Engineering Cluster, Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore, 828608, Singapore
3 Electronics and Communication Engineering Department, Sapthagiri NPS University, Bangalore, 560057, India
4 School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, SR University, Warangal, 506371, India
5 Electronics Telecommunication Engineering, J D College of Engineering Management, Nagpur, 441501, India
6 College of Computer Science, King Khalid University, Abha, 61421, Saudi Arabia

* Corresponding Author: Naim Ahmad. Email:

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2025, 145(3), 4107-4127. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2025.073387

Received 17 September 2025; Accepted 11 November 2025; Issue published 23 December 2025

Abstract

A phase-aware cross-modal framework is presented that synthesizes UWF_FA from non-invasive UWF_RI for diabetic retinopathy (DR) stratification. A curated cohort of 1198 patients (2915 UWF_RI and 17,854 UWF_FA images) with strict registration quality supports training across three angiographic phases (initial, mid, final). The generator is based on a modified pix2pixHD with an added Gradient Variance Loss to better preserve microvasculature, and is evaluated using MAE, PSNR, SSIM, and MS-SSIM on held-out pairs. Quantitatively, the mid phase achieves the lowest MAE (98.76 ± 42.67), while SSIM remains high across phases. Expert review shows substantial agreement (Cohen’s κ = 0.78–0.82) and Turing-style misclassification of 50%–70% of synthetic images as real, indicating strong perceptual realism. For downstream DR stratification, fusing multi-phase synthetic UWF_FA with UWF_RI in a Swin Transformer classifier yields significant gains over a UWF_RI-only baseline, with the full-phase setting (Set D) reaching AUC = 0.910 and accuracy = 0.829. These results support synthetic UWF_FA as a scalable, non-invasive complement to dye-based angiography that enhances screening accuracy while avoiding injection-related risks.

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Keywords

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