Multi-label classification of retinal diseases based on fundus images using Resnet and Transformer

Abstract

Retinal disorders are a major cause of irreversible vision loss, which can be mitigated through accurate and early diagnosis. Conventionally, fundus images are used as the gold diagnosis standard in detecting retinal diseases. In recent years, more and more researchers have employed deep learning methods for diagnosing ophthalmic diseases using fundus photography datasets. Among the studies, most of them focus on diagnosing a single disease in fundus images, making it still challenging for the diagnosis of multiple diseases. In this paper, we propose a framework that combines ResNet and Transformer for multi-label classification of retinal disease. This model employs ResNet to extract image features, utilizes Transformer to capture global information, and enhances the relationships between categories through learnable label embedding. On the publicly available Ocular Disease Intelligent Recognition (ODIR-5 k) dataset, the proposed method achieves a mean average precision of 92.86%, an area under the curve (AUC) of 97.27%, and a recall of 90.62%, which outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches for the multi-label classification. The proposed method represents a significant advancement in the field of retinal disease diagnosis, offering a more accurate, efficient, and comprehensive model for the detection of multiple retinal conditions.

Keywords: Color fundus images; Deep CNN; Multi-label image classification; Transformer.