Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Data-Efficient DRIL Classification in OCT Images

Background/Objectives: Disorganization of the retinal inner layers (DRIL) is an important biomarker of diabetic macular edema (DME) that has a very strong association with visual acuity (VA) in patients. But the unavailability of annotated training data from experts severely limits the adaptability of models pretrained on real-world images owing to significant variations in the domain, posing two primary challenges for the design of efficient computerized DRIL detection methods. Methods: In an attempt to address these challenges, we propose a novel, self-supervision-based learning framework that employs a huge unlabeled optical coherence tomography (OCT) dataset to learn and detect clinically applicable interpretations before fine-tuning with a small proprietary dataset of annotated OCT images. In this research, we introduce a spatial Bootstrap Your Own Latent (BYOL) with a hybrid spatial aware loss function aimed to capture anatomical representations from unlabeled OCT dataset of 108,309 images that cover various retinal abnormalities, and then adapt the learned interpretations for DRIL classification employing 823 annotated OCT images. Results: With an accuracy of 99.39%, the proposed two-stage approach substantially exceeds the direct transfer learning models pretrained on ImageNet. Conclusions: The findings demonstrate the efficacy of domain-specific self-supervised learning for rare retinal pathological detection tasks with limited annotated data.