Automated detection and classification of early AMD biomarkers using deep learning

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) affects millions of people and is a leading cause of blindness throughout the world. Ideally, affected individuals would be identified at an early stage before late sequelae such as outer retinal atrophy or exudative neovascular membranes develop, which could produce irreversible visual loss. Early identification could allow patients to be staged and appropriate monitoring intervals to be established. Accurate staging of earlier AMD stages could also facilitate the development of new preventative therapeutics. However, accurate and precise staging of AMD, particularly using newer optical coherence tomography (OCT)-based biomarkers may be time-intensive and requires expert training which may not feasible in many circumstances, particularly in screening settings. In this work we develop deep learning method for automated detection and classification of early AMD OCT biomarker. Deep convolution neural networks (CNN) were explicitly trained for performing automated detection and classification of hyperreflective foci, hyporeflective foci within the drusen, and subretinal drusenoid deposits from OCT B-scans. Numerous experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art CNNs and different transfer learning protocols on an image dataset containing approximately 20000 OCT B-scans from 153 patients. An overall accuracy of 87% for identifying the presence of early AMD biomarkers was achieved.