A Hybrid Global-Local Representation CNN Model for Automatic Cataract Grading

Cataract is one of the most serious eye diseases leading to blindness. Early detection and treatment can reduce the rate of blindness in cataract patients. However, the professional knowledge of ophthalmologists is necessary for the clinical cataract detection. Therefore, the potential costs may make it difficult for the widespread use of cataract detection to prevent blindness. Artificial intelligence assisted diagnosis based on medical images has attracted more and more attention of researchers. Many studies have focused on the use of pre-defined feature sets for cataract classification, but the predefined feature sets may be incomplete or redundant. On account of the aforementioned issues, some studies have proposed deep learning methods to automatically extract image features, but all based on global features and none has analyzed the layer-by-layer transformation process of the middle-tier features. This paper uses convolutional neural networks (CNN) to learn useful features directly from input data, and deconvolution network method is employed to investigate how CNN characterizes cataract layer-by-layer. We found that compared to the global feature set, the detail vascular information, which is lost after multi-layer convolution calculation also plays an important role in cataract grading task. And this finding fits with the morphological definition of fundus image. Through the finding, we gained insights into the design of hybrid global-local feature representation model to improve the recognition performance of automatic cataract grading.