A novel approach for automatic classification of macular degeneration OCT images

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and diabetic macular edema (DME) are significant causes of blindness worldwide. The prevalence of these diseases is steadily increasing due to population aging. Therefore, early diagnosis and prevention are crucial for effective treatment. Classification of Macular Degeneration OCT Images is a widely used method for assessing retinal lesions. However, there are two main challenges in OCT image classification: incomplete image feature extraction and lack of prominence in important positional features. To address these challenges, we proposed a deep learning neural network model called MSA-Net, which incorporates our proposed multi-scale architecture and spatial attention mechanism. Our multi-scale architecture is based on depthwise separable convolution, which ensures comprehensive feature extraction from multiple scales while minimizing the growth of model parameters. The spatial attention mechanism is aim to highlight the important positional features in the images, which emphasizes the representation of macular region features in OCT images. We test MSA-NET on the NEH dataset and the UCSD dataset, performing three-class (CNV, DURSEN, and NORMAL) and four-class (CNV, DURSEN, DME, and NORMAL) classification tasks. On the NEH dataset, the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are 98.1%, 97.9%, and 98.0%, respectively. After fine-tuning on the UCSD dataset, the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are 96.7%, 96.7%, and 98.9%, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate the excellent classification performance and generalization ability of our model compared to previous models and recent well-known OCT classification models, establishing it as a highly competitive intelligence classification approach in the field of macular degeneration.