Optoelectronics Letters, Volume. 20, Issue 1, 48(2024)

A deep learning based fine-grained classification algo-rithm for grading of visual impairment in cataract pa-tients

Jiewei JIANG1... Yi ZHANG1,*, He XIE2, Jingshi YANG1, Jiamin GONG1 and Zhongwen and LI3 |Show fewer author(s)
Author Affiliations
  • 1School of Electronic Engineering, Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications, Xi’an 710121, China
  • 2School of Ophthalmology and Optometry and Eye Hospital, Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou 325000, China
  • 3Ningbo Eye Hospital, Wenzhou Medical University, Ningbo 315000, China
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    Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have shown promising potential for the automated screening and grading of cataracts. However, the different types of visual impairment caused by cataracts exhibit similar phenotypes, posing significant challenges for accurately assessing the severity of visual impairment. To address this issue, we pro-pose a dense convolution combined with attention mechanism and multi-level classifier (DAMC_Net) for visual im-pairment grading. First, the double-attention mechanism is utilized to enable the DAMC_Net to focus on le-sions-related regions. Then, a hierarchical multi-level classifier is constructed to enhance the recognition ability in dis-tinguishing the severities of visual impairment, while maintaining a better screening rate for normal samples. In addi-tion, a cost-sensitive method is applied to address the problem of higher false-negative rate caused by the imbalanced dataset. Experimental results demonstrated that the DAMC_Net outperformed ResNet50 and dense convolutional network 121 (DenseNet121) models, with sensitivity improvements of 6.0% and 3.4% on the category of mild visual impairment caused by cataracts (MVICC), and 2.1% and 4.3% on the category of moderate to severe visual impair-ment caused by cataracts (MSVICC), respectively. The comparable performance on two external test datasets was achieved, further verifying the effectiveness and generalizability of the DAMC_Net.

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    JIANG Jiewei, ZHANG Yi, XIE He, YANG Jingshi, GONG Jiamin, and LI Zhongwen. A deep learning based fine-grained classification algo-rithm for grading of visual impairment in cataract pa-tients[J]. Optoelectronics Letters, 2024, 20(1): 48

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    Paper Information

    Received: Mar. 20, 2023

    Accepted: Jul. 12, 2023

    Published Online: May. 15, 2024

    The Author Email: Yi ZHANG (zhangyi03110214@163.com)

    DOI:10.1007/s11801-024-3050-4

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