Binary and multi-class automated detection of age-related macular degeneration using convolutional- and transformer-based architectures.

BACKGROUND AND

OBJECTIVE

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is an eye disease that happens when ageing causes damage to the macula, and it is the leading cause of blindness in developed countries. Screening retinal fundus images allows ophthalmologists to early detect, diagnose and treat this disease; however, the manual interpretation of images is a time-consuming task. In this paper, we aim to study different deep learning methods to diagnose AMD.

METHODS

We have conducted a thorough study of two families of deep learning models based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) and transformer architectures to automatically diagnose referable/non-referable AMD, and grade AMD severity scales (no AMD, early AMD, intermediate AMD, and advanced AMD). In addition, we have analysed several progressive resizing strategies and ensemble methods for convolutional-based architectures to further improve the performance of the models.

RESULTS

As a first result, we have shown that transformer-based architectures obtain considerably worse results than convolutional-based architectures for diagnosing AMD. Moreover, we have built a model for diagnosing referable AMD that yielded a mean F1-score (SD) of 92.60% (0.47), a mean AUROC (SD) of 97.53% (0.40), and a mean weighted kappa coefficient (SD) of 85.28% (0.91); and an ensemble of models for grading AMD severity scales with a mean accuracy (SD) of 82.55% (2.92), and a mean weighted kappa coefficient (SD) of 84.76% (2.45).

CONCLUSIONS

This work shows that working with convolutional based architectures is more suitable than using transformer based models for classifying and grading AMD from retinal fundus images. Furthermore, convolutional models can be improved by means of progressive resizing strategies and ensemble methods.