Domain Adaptation-Based Automated Detection of Retinal Diseases from Optical Coherence Tomography Images

Abstract

Purpose

To verify the effectiveness of domain adaptation in generalizing a deep learning-based anomaly detection model to unseen optical coherence tomography (OCT) images.

Methods

Two datasets (source and target, where labelled training data was only available for the source) captured by two different OCT facilities were collected to train the model. We defined the model containing a feature extractor and a classifier as Model One and trained it with only labeled source data. The proposed domain adaptation model was defined as Model Two, which has the same feature extractor and classifier as Model One but has an additional domain critic in the training phase. We trained the Model Two with both the source and target datasets; the feature extractor was trained to extract domain-invariant features while the domain critic learned to capture the domain discrepancy. Finally, a well-trained feature extractor was used to extract domain-invariant features and a classifier was used to detect images with retinal pathologies in the two domains.

Results

The target data consisted of 3,058 OCT B-scans captured from 163 participants. Model One achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.912 [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.895–0.962], while Model Two achieved an overall AUC of 0.989 [95% CI, 0.982–0.993] for detecting pathological retinas from healthy samples. Moreover, Model Two achieved an average retinopathies detection accuracy of 94.52%. Heat maps showed that the algorithm focused on the area with pathological changes during processing, similar to manual grading in daily clinical work.

Conclusions

The proposed domain adaptation model showed a strong ability in reducing the domain distance between different OCT datasets.

Keywords:

• Machine learning
• optical coherence tomography
• domain adaptation
• heat map
• age-related macular degeneration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding authors, [CJ, YH].

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by research grants from the National Key Research & Development Plan under Grant [number 2017YFC0108200]; the National Natural Science foundation of China under Grant [number 82070980]; and the Shanghai Committee of Science and Technology under Grant [number 19441900900, 201409006800].