Multi-Disease Detection in Retinal Imaging based on Ensembling Heterogeneous Deep Learning Models
This work addresses preventable or undiagnosed visual impairment affecting billions globally by providing a clinical decision support tool, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing ensemble and deep learning techniques.
The paper tackled automated multi-disease detection in retinal imaging to address visual impairment and blindness by proposing an ensemble learning pipeline that combines heterogeneous deep learning models, achieving high accuracy and reliability comparable to state-of-the-art methods.
Preventable or undiagnosed visual impairment and blindness affect billion of people worldwide. Automated multi-disease detection models offer great potential to address this problem via clinical decision support in diagnosis. In this work, we proposed an innovative multi-disease detection pipeline for retinal imaging which utilizes ensemble learning to combine the predictive capabilities of several heterogeneous deep convolutional neural network models. Our pipeline includes state-of-the-art strategies like transfer learning, class weighting, real-time image augmentation and Focal loss utilization. Furthermore, we integrated ensemble learning techniques like heterogeneous deep learning models, bagging via 5-fold cross-validation and stacked logistic regression models. Through internal and external evaluation, we were able to validate and demonstrate high accuracy and reliability of our pipeline, as well as the comparability with other state-of-the-art pipelines for retinal disease prediction.