Dry age-related macular degeneration classification from optical coherence tomography images based on ensemble deep learning architecture.

Background: Dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a retinal disease, which has been the third leading cause of vision loss. But current AMD classification technologies did not focus on the classification of early stage. This study aimed to develop a deep learning architecture to improve the classification accuracy of dry AMD, through the analysis of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. Methods: We put forward an ensemble deep learning architecture which integrated four different convolution neural networks including ResNet50, EfficientNetB4, MobileNetV3 and Xception. All networks were pre-trained and fine-tuned. Then diverse convolution neural networks were combined. To classify OCT images, the proposed architecture was trained on the dataset from Shenyang Aier Excellence Hospital. The number of original images was 4,096 from 1,310 patients. After rotation and flipping operations, the dataset consisting of 16,384 retinal OCT images could be established. Results: Evaluation and comparison obtained from three-fold cross-validation were used to show the advantage of the proposed architecture. Four metrics were applied to compare the performance of each base model. Moreover, different combination strategies were also compared to validate the merit of the proposed architecture. The results demonstrated that the proposed architecture could categorize various stages of AMD. Moreover, the proposed network could improve the classification performance of nascent geographic atrophy (nGA). Conclusion: In this article, an ensemble deep learning was proposed to classify dry AMD progression stages. The performance of the proposed architecture produced promising classification results which showed its advantage to provide global diagnosis for early AMD screening. The classification performance demonstrated its potential for individualized treatment plans for patients with AMD.