Modelling Geographic Atrophy Progression using Implicit Neural Representations

Abstract

Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is the major cause of blindness in the Western world. Its late dry phase is characterised by irreversible atrophic areas, namely Geographic Atrophy (GA). Longitudinal Fundus Autofluorescence (FAF) image acquisitions are currently the main tool for assessing lesion growth over time at the image level. However, due to its highly individualised progression, the evolution of late AMD remains poorly understood. In this work, we propose using Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) to model GA progression at the individual level in a low-data setting. Our approach generates both FAF and GA segmentation at both past and future time points. Among the comparison models, our method achieves competitive segmentation quality across different scenarios, yielding the lowest Mean Absolute Error (MAE) for the GA lesion area and the highest DICE score, without sacrificing FAF image quality. The code is available at https://github.com/SimoneSarrocco/ga-progression-with-inrs.