Automated classification of age-related macular degeneration from optical coherence tomography images using deep learning approach

Abstract

Early detection of macular diseases can prevent vision loss. Manual screening can be unreliable due to the similarity in the pathological presentations of common retinal illnesses like age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Researchers are becoming more interested in the accurate automated computer-based detection of macular diseases. Using healthy optical coherence tomography (OCT) images, the drusens (early stage) and choroidal neovascularization (CNV) (late stage) of AMD are thus classified using a completely different approach in this paper. The new deep learning (DL) model is proposed for multiple OCT image segmentation of ophthalmological diseases using attention-based nested U-Net (ANU-Net). The flower pollination optimization algorithm (FPOA) is used to optimize the hyperparameters of the network. The SqueezeNet-based classification can be made in the pre-processed images. A dataset from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) is used to evaluate the proposed method. 98.7% accuracy, 99.8% specificity, and 99.7% sensitivity are achieved by the proposed method. The proposed method produces better identification results for automated preliminary diagnosis of macular diseases in hospitals and eye clinics due to the positive classification results.