Treatment classification of posterior capsular opacification (PCO) using automated ground truths
This work addresses the challenge of reducing frequent hospital visits for PCO patients by automating treatment classification, though it is incremental as it applies existing deep learning techniques to a specific medical domain.
The paper tackles the problem of determining treatment need for posterior capsular opacification (PCO) by proposing a deep learning method to segment PCO images and classify them into treatment required or not yet required cases, achieving a Dice coefficient greater than 0.8 and an F2-score of 0.98 in validation.
Determination of treatment need of posterior capsular opacification (PCO)-- one of the most common complication of cataract surgery -- is a difficult process due to its local unavailability and the fact that treatment is provided only after PCO occurs in the central visual axis. In this paper we propose a deep learning (DL)-based method to first segment PCO images then classify the images into \textit{treatment required} and \textit{not yet required} cases in order to reduce frequent hospital visits. To train the model, we prepare a training image set with ground truths (GT) obtained from two strategies: (i) manual and (ii) automated. So, we have two models: (i) Model 1 (trained with image set containing manual GT) (ii) Model 2 (trained with image set containing automated GT). Both models when evaluated on validation image set gave Dice coefficient value greater than 0.8 and intersection-over-union (IoU) score greater than 0.67 in our experiments. Comparison between gold standard GT and segmented results from our models gave a Dice coefficient value greater than 0.7 and IoU score greater than 0.6 for both the models showing that automated ground truths can also result in generation of an efficient model. Comparison between our classification result and clinical classification shows 0.98 F2-score for outputs from both the models.