DeepUWF: An Automated Ultra-Wide-Field Fundus Screening System via Deep Learning.

Journal: IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics
Published Date:

Abstract

The emerging ultra-wide field of view (UWF) fundus color imaging is a powerful tool for fundus screening. However, manual screening is labor-intensive and subjective. Based on 2644 UWF images, a set of early fundus abnormal screening system named DeepUWF is developed. DeepUWF includes an abnormal fundus screening subsystem and a disease diagnosis subsystem for three kinds of fundus diseases (retinal tear & retinal detachment, diabetic retinopathy and pathological myopia). The components in the system are composed of a set of excellent convolutional neural networks and two custom classifiers. However, the contrast of UWF images used in the research is low, which seriously limits the extraction of fine features of UWF images by depth model. Therefore, the high specificity and low sensitivity of prediction results have always been difficult problems in research. In order to solve this problem, six kinds of image preprocessing techniques are adopted, and their effects on the prediction performance of fundus abnormal and three kinds of fundus diseases models are studied. A variety of experimental indicators are used to evaluate the algorithms for validity and reliability. The experimental results show that these preprocessing methods are helpful to improve the learning ability of the networks and achieve good sensitivity and specificity. Without ophthalmologists, DeepUWF has potential application value, which is helpful for fundus health screening and workflow improvement.

Authors

  • Wei Zhang
    The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University, Nanchang, China.
  • Xiujuan Zhao
    State Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology, Zhongshan Ophthalmic Centre, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.
  • Yuanyuan Chen
    Center for Radiation Oncology, Affiliated Hangzhou Cancer Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou 310001, China.
  • Jie Zhong
    Department of Ophthalmology, Sichuan Academy of Medical Sciences and Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital, Chengdu, PR China. Electronic address: zjllxx1968@163.com.
  • Zhang Yi