DeepSeeNet: A deep learning model for automated classification of patient-based age-related macular degeneration severity from color fundus photographs

Abstract

In assessing the severity of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the Age-Related Eye Disease Study (AREDS) Simplified Severity Scale predicts the risk of progression to late AMD. However, its manual use requires the time-consuming participation of expert practitioners. Although several automated deep learning systems have been developed for classifying color fundus photographs (CFP) of individual eyes by AREDS severity score, none to date has used a patient-based scoring system that uses images from both eyes to assign a severity score. DeepSeeNet, a deep learning model, was developed to classify patients automatically by the AREDS Simplified Severity Scale (score 0-5) using bilateral CFP. DeepSeeNet was trained on 58,402 and tested on 900 images from the longitudinal follow-up of 4549 participants from AREDS. Gold standard labels were obtained using reading center grades. DeepSeeNet simulates the human grading process by first detecting individual AMD risk factors (drusen size, pigmentary abnormalities) for each eye and then calculating a patient-based AMD severity score using the AREDS Simplified Severity Scale. DeepSeeNet performed better on patient-based classification (accuracy = 0.671; kappa = 0.558) than retinal specialists (accuracy = 0.599; kappa = 0.467) with high AUC in the detection of large drusen (0.94), pigmentary abnormalities (0.93), and late AMD (0.97). DeepSeeNet demonstrated high accuracy with increased transparency in the automated assignment of individual patients to AMD risk categories based on the AREDS Simplified Severity Scale. These results highlight the potential of deep learning to assist and enhance clinical decision-making in patients with AMD, such as early AMD detection and risk prediction for developing late AMD. DeepSeeNet is publicly available on https://github.com/ncbi-nlp/DeepSeeNet.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in Ophthalmology

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• Predicting Progression of Age-related Macular Degeneration from Fundus Images using Deep Learning
• AGE Challenge: Angle Closure Glaucoma Evaluation in Anterior Segment Optical Coherence Tomography
• Predicting risk of late age-related macular degeneration using deep learning
• Stacking Ensemble Learning in Deep Domain Adaptation for Ophthalmic Image Classification
• Unsupervised deep learning for grading of age-related macular degeneration using retinal fundus images
• Analyzing Epistemic and Aleatoric Uncertainty for Drusen Segmentation in Optical Coherence Tomography Images
• Self-supervised Feature Learning via Exploiting Multi-modal Data for Retinal Disease Diagnosis
• Fundus Image Analysis for Age Related Macular Degeneration: ADAM-2020 Challenge Report