Diabetic Macular Edema Detection Using End-to-End Deep Fusion Model and Anatomical Landmark Visualization on an Edge...

Diabetic macular edema (DME) is a common cause of vision impairment and blindness in patients with diabetes. However, vision loss can be prevented by regular eye examinations during primary care. This study aimed to design an artificial intelligence (AI) system to facilitate ophthalmology referrals by physicians.

We developed an end-to-end deep fusion model for DME classification and hard exudate (HE) detection. Based on the architecture of fusion model, we also applied a dual model which included an independent classifier and object detector to perform these two tasks separately. We used 35,001 annotated fundus images from three hospitals between 2007 and 2018 in Taiwan to create a private dataset. The Private dataset, Messidor-1 and Messidor-2 were used to assess the performance of the fusion model for DME classification and HE detection. A second object detector was trained to identify anatomical landmarks (optic disc and macula). We integrated the fusion model and the anatomical landmark detector, and evaluated their performance on an edge device, a device with limited compute resources.

For DME classification of our private testing dataset, Messidor-1 and Messidor-2, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) for the fusion model had values of 98.1, 95.2, and 95.8%, the sensitivities were 96.4, 88.7, and 87.4%, the specificities were 90.1, 90.2, and 90.2%, and the accuracies were 90.8, 90.0, and 89.9%, respectively. In addition, the AUC was not significantly different for the fusion and dual models for the three datasets (p = 0.743, 0.942, and 0.114, respectively). For HE detection, the fusion model achieved a sensitivity of 79.5%, a specificity of 87.7%, and an accuracy of 86.3% using our private testing dataset. The sensitivity of the fusion model was higher than that of the dual model (p = 0.048). For optic disc and macula detection, the second object detector achieved accuracies of 98.4% (optic disc) and 99.3% (macula). The fusion model and the anatomical landmark detector can be deployed on a portable edge device.

This portable AI system exhibited excellent performance for the classification of DME, and the visualization of HE and anatomical locations. It facilitates interpretability and can serve as a clinical reference for physicians. Clinically, this system could be applied to diabetic eye screening to improve the interpretation of fundus imaging in patients with DME.