Synergic Adversarial Label Learning for Grading Retinal Diseases via Knowledge Distillation and Multi-task Learning
This work addresses the need for automated and reliable screening of retinal diseases, which is incremental as it builds on existing knowledge distillation and multi-task learning techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of limited annotated data for grading retinal diseases like AMD and DR by proposing a synergic adversarial label learning method that leverages shared features and knowledge distillation, resulting in significantly improved accuracy for disease grading.
The need for comprehensive and automated screening methods for retinal image classification has long been recognized. Well-qualified doctors annotated images are very expensive and only a limited amount of data is available for various retinal diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and diabetic retinopathy (DR). Some studies show that AMD and DR share some common features like hemorrhagic points and exudation but most classification algorithms only train those disease models independently. Inspired by knowledge distillation where additional monitoring signals from various sources is beneficial to train a robust model with much fewer data. We propose a method called synergic adversarial label learning (SALL) which leverages relevant retinal disease labels in both semantic and feature space as additional signals and train the model in a collaborative manner. Our experiments on DR and AMD fundus image classification task demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly improve the accuracy of the model for grading diseases. In addition, we conduct additional experiments to show the effectiveness of SALL from the aspects of reliability and interpretability in the context of medical imaging application.