Pathological Myopia Image Recognition Strategy Based on Data Augmentation and Model Fusion

The automatic diagnosis of various retinal diseases based on fundus images is important in supporting clinical decision-making. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable results in such tasks. However, their high expression ability possibly leads to overfitting. Therefore, data augmentation (DA) techniques have been proposed to prevent overfitting while enriching datasets. Recent CNN architectures with more parameters render traditional DA techniques insufficient. In this study, we proposed a new DA strategy based on multimodal fusion (DAMF) which could integrate the standard DA method, data disrupting method, data mixing method, and autoadjustment method to enhance the image data in the training dataset to create new training images. In addition, we fused the results of the classifier by voting on the basis of DAMF, which further improved the generalization ability of the model. The experimental results showed that the optimal DA mode could be matched to the image dataset through our DA strategy. We evaluated DAMF on the iChallenge-PM dataset. At last, we compared training results between 12 DAMF processed datasets and the original training dataset. Compared with the original dataset, the optimal DAMF achieved an accuracy increase of 2.85% on iChallenge-PM.