RD-OCT net: hybrid learning system for automated diagnosis of macular diseases from OCT retinal images

Macular Edema is a leading cause of visual impairment and blindness in patients with ocular fundus diseases. Due to its non-invasive and high-resolution characteristics, optical coherence tomography (OCT) has been extensively utilized for the diagnosis of macular diseases. The manual detection of retinal diseases by clinicians is a laborious process, further complicated by the challenging identification of macular diseases. This difficulty arises from the significant pathological alterations occurring within the retinal layers, as well as the accumulation of fluid in the retina. Deep Learning neural networks are utilized for automatic detection of retinal diseases. This paper aims to propose a lightweight hybrid learning Retinal Disease OCT Net with a reduced number of trainable parameters and enable automatic classification of retinal diseases. A Hybrid Learning Retinal Disease OCT Net (RD-OCT) is utilized for the multiclass classification of major retinal diseases, namely neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD), diabetic macular edema (DME), retinal vein occlusion (RVO), and normal retinal conditions. The diagnosis of retinal diseases is facilitated by the use of hybrid learning models and pre-trained deep learning models in the field of artificial intelligence. The Hybrid Learning RD-OCT Net provides better accuracy of 97.6% for nAMD, 98.08% for DME, 98% for RVO, and 97% for the Normal group. The respective area under the curve values were 0.99, 0.97, 1.0, and 0.99. The utilization of the RD-OCT model will be useful for ophthalmologists in the diagnosis of prevalent retinal diseases, due to the simplicity of the system and reduced number of trainable parameters.