An Interpretable Ensemble Deep Learning Model for Diabetic Retinopathy Disease Classification.

Journal: Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Annual International Conference
Published Date:

Abstract

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one kind of eye disease that is caused by overtime diabetes. Lots of patients around the world suffered from DR which may bring about blindness. Early detection of DR is a rigid quest which can remind the DR patients to seek corresponding treatments in time. This paper presents an automatic image-level DR detection system using multiple well-trained deep learning models. Besides, several deep learning models are integrated using the Adaboost algorithm in order to reduce the bias of each single model. To explain the results of DR detection, this paper provides weighted class activation maps (CAMs) that can illustrate the suspected position of lesions. In the pre-processing stage, eight image transformation ways are also introduced to help augment the diversity of fundus images. Experiments demonstrate that the method proposed by this paper has stronger robustness and acquires more excellent performance than that of individual deep learning model.

Authors

  • Hongyang Jiang
    Department of Urology, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
  • Kang Yang
    School of Pharmacy, Minzu University of China, Beijing 100081, China.
  • Mengdi Gao
  • Dongdong Zhang
    Brain Korea 21 PLUS Project for Medical Science, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea.
  • He Ma
    Sino-Dutch Biomedical and Information Engineering School, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110819, China and Key Laboratory of Medical Image Computing, Ministry of Education, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110819, China.
  • Wei Qian
    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at El Paso, 500 West University Avenue, El Paso, TX 79968, USA; Sino-Dutch Biomedical and Information Engineering School, Northeastern University, No.11, Lane 3, Wenhua Road, Heping District, Shenyang, Liaoning 110819, China. Electronic address: wqian@utep.edu.