AIM: To study the precise segmentation of pterygium lesions using the convolutional neural networks from artificial intelligence.

METHODS: The network structure of Phase-fusion PSPNet for the segmentation of pterygium lesions is proposed based on the PSPNet model structure. In our network, the up-sampling module is connected behind the pyramid pooling module, which gradually increase the sampling based on the principle of phased increase. Therefore, the information loss is reduced, it is suitable for segmentation tasks with fuzzy edges. The experiments conducted on the dataset provided by the Affiliated Eye Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, which includes 517 ocular surface photographic images of pterygium were divided into training set(330 images), validation set(37 images)and test set(150 images), which the training set and the validation set images are used for training, and the test set images are only used for testing. Comparing results of intelligent segmentation and expert annotation of pterygium lesions.

RESULTS: Phase-fusion PSPNet network structure for pterygium mean intersection over union(MIOU)and mean average precision(MPA)were 86.31% and 91.91%, respectively, and pterygium intersection over union(IOU)and average precision(PA)were 77.64% and 86.10%, respectively.

CONCLUSION: Convolutional neural networks can segment pterygium lesions with high precision, which is helpful to provide an important reference for doctors' further diagnosis of disease and surgical recommendations, and can also visualize the pterygium intelligent diagnosis.