RURANET++: An Unsupervised Learning Method for Diabetic Macular Edema Based on SCSE Attention Mechanisms and Dynamic Multi-Projection Head Clustering
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Feb 27, 2025
Abstract
Diabetic Macular Edema (DME), a prevalent complication among diabetic
patients, constitutes a major cause of visual impairment and blindness.
Although deep learning has achieved remarkable progress in medical image
analysis, traditional DME diagnosis still relies on extensive annotated data
and subjective ophthalmologist assessments, limiting practical applications. To
address this, we present RURANET++, an unsupervised learning-based automated
DME diagnostic system. This framework incorporates an optimized U-Net
architecture with embedded Spatial and Channel Squeeze & Excitation (SCSE)
attention mechanisms to enhance lesion feature extraction. During feature
processing, a pre-trained GoogLeNet model extracts deep features from retinal
images, followed by PCA-based dimensionality reduction to 50 dimensions for
computational efficiency. Notably, we introduce a novel clustering algorithm
employing multi-projection heads to explicitly control cluster diversity while
dynamically adjusting similarity thresholds, thereby optimizing intra-class
consistency and inter-class discrimination. Experimental results demonstrate
superior performance across multiple metrics, achieving maximum accuracy
(0.8411), precision (0.8593), recall (0.8411), and F1-score (0.8390), with
exceptional clustering quality. This work provides an efficient unsupervised
solution for DME diagnosis with significant clinical implications.
