Multiclass retinal disease classification and lesion segmentation in OCT B-scan images using cascaded convolutional networks

Appl Opt. 2020 Nov 20;59(33):10312-10320. doi: 10.1364/AO.409414.

Abstract

Disease classification and lesion segmentation of retinal optical coherence tomography images play important roles in ophthalmic computer-aided diagnosis. However, existing methods achieve the two tasks separately, which is insufficient for clinical application and ignores the internal relation of disease and lesion features. In this paper, a framework of cascaded convolutional networks is proposed to jointly classify retinal diseases and segment lesions. First, we adopt an auxiliary binary classification network to identify normal and abnormal images. Then a novel, to the best of our knowledge, U-shaped multi-task network, BDA-Net, combined with a bidirectional decoder and self-attention mechanism, is used to further analyze abnormal images. Experimental results show that the proposed method reaches an accuracy of 0.9913 in classification and achieves an improvement of around 3% in Dice compared to the baseline U-shaped model in segmentation.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Choroidal Neovascularization / diagnostic imaging
  • Diabetic Retinopathy / diagnostic imaging
  • Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Macular Edema / diagnostic imaging
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Retinal Diseases / classification*
  • Retinal Diseases / diagnostic imaging*
  • Retinal Drusen / diagnostic imaging
  • Tomography, Optical Coherence / methods*