Federated Learning for Microvasculature Segmentation and Diabetic Retinopathy Classification of OCT Data

To evaluate the performance of a federated learning framework for deep neural network-based retinal microvasculature segmentation and referable diabetic retinopathy (RDR) classification using OCT and OCT angiography (OCTA).

Retrospective analysis of clinical OCT and OCTA scans of control participants and patients with diabetes.

The 153 OCTA en face images used for microvasculature segmentation were acquired from 4 OCT instruments with fields of view ranging from 2 × 2-mm to 6 × 6-mm. The 700 eyes used for RDR classification consisted of OCTA en face images and structural OCT projections acquired from 2 commercial OCT systems.

OCT angiography images used for microvasculature segmentation were delineated manually and verified by retina experts. Diabetic retinopathy (DR) severity was evaluated by retinal specialists and was condensed into 2 classes: non-RDR and RDR. The federated learning configuration was demonstrated via simulation using 4 clients for microvasculature segmentation and was compared with other collaborative training methods. Subsequently, federated learning was applied over multiple institutions for RDR classification and was compared with models trained and tested on data from the same institution (internal models) and different institutions (external models).

For microvasculature segmentation, we measured the accuracy and Dice similarity coefficient (DSC). For severity classification, we measured accuracy, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), area under the precision-recall curve, balanced accuracy, F1 score, sensitivity, and specificity.

For both applications, federated learning achieved similar performance as internal models. Specifically, for microvasculature segmentation, the federated learning model achieved similar performance (mean DSC across all test sets, 0.793) as models trained on a fully centralized dataset (mean DSC, 0.807). For RDR classification, federated learning achieved a mean AUROC of 0.954 and 0.960; the internal models attained a mean AUROC of 0.956 and 0.973. Similar results are reflected in the other calculated evaluation metrics.

Federated learning showed similar results to traditional deep learning in both applications of segmentation and classification, while maintaining data privacy. Evaluation metrics highlight the potential of collaborative learning for increasing domain diversity and the generalizability of models used for the classification of OCT data.