TMM-Nets: Transferred Multi- to Mono-Modal Generation for Lupus Retinopathy Diagnosis

Rare diseases, which are severely underrepresented in basic and clinical research, can particularly benefit from machine learning techniques. However, current learning-based approaches usually focus on either mono-modal image data or matched multi-modal data, whereas the diagnosis of rare diseases necessitates the aggregation of unstructured and unmatched multi-modal image data due to their rare and diverse nature. In this study, we therefore propose diagnosis-guided multi-to-mono modal generation networks (TMM-Nets) along with training and testing procedures. TMM-Nets can transfer data from multiple sources to a single modality for diagnostic data structurization. To demonstrate their potential in the context of rare diseases, TMM-Nets were deployed to diagnose the lupus retinopathy (LR-SLE), leveraging unmatched regular and ultra-wide-field fundus images for transfer learning. The TMM-Nets encoded the transfer learning from diabetic retinopathy to LR-SLE based on the similarity of the fundus lesions. In addition, a lesion-aware multi-scale attention mechanism was developed for clinical alerts, enabling TMM-Nets not only to inform patient care, but also to provide insights consistent with those of clinicians. An adversarial strategy was also developed to refine multi- to mono-modal image generation based on diagnostic results and the data distribution to enhance the data augmentation performance. Compared to the baseline model, the TMM-Nets showed 35.19% and 33.56% F1 score improvements on the test and external validation sets, respectively. In addition, the TMM-Nets can be used to develop diagnostic models for other rare diseases.