No Arabic abstract
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading from fundus images has attracted increasing interest in both academic and industrial communities. Most convolutional neural network (CNN) based algorithms treat DR grading as a classification task via image-level annotations. However, these algorithms have not fully explored the valuable information in the DR-related lesions. In this paper, we present a robust framework, which collaboratively utilizes patch-level and image-level annotations, for DR severity grading. By an end-to-end optimization, this framework can bi-directionally exchange the fine-grained lesion and image-level grade information. As a result, it exploits more discriminative features for DR grading. The proposed framework shows better performance than the recent state-of-the-art algorithms and three clinical ophthalmologists with over nine years of experience. By testing on datasets of different distributions (such as label and camera), we prove that our algorithm is robust when facing image quality and distribution variations that commonly exist in real-world practice. We inspect the proposed framework through extensive ablation studies to indicate the effectiveness and necessity of each motivation. The code and some valuable annotations are now publicly available.
Manually annotating medical images is extremely expensive, especially for large-scale datasets. Self-supervised contrastive learning has been explored to learn feature representations from unlabeled images. However, unlike natural images, the application of contrastive learning to medical images is relatively limited. In this work, we propose a self-supervised framework, namely lesion-based contrastive learning for automated diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading. Instead of taking entire images as the input in the common contrastive learning scheme, lesion patches are employed to encourage the feature extractor to learn representations that are highly discriminative for DR grading. We also investigate different data augmentation operations in defining our contrastive prediction task. Extensive experiments are conducted on the publicly-accessible dataset EyePACS, demonstrating that our proposed framework performs outstandingly on DR grading in terms of both linear evaluation and transfer capacity evaluation.
Assessing the degree of disease severity in biomedical images is a task similar to standard classification but constrained by an underlying structure in the label space. Such a structure reflects the monotonic relationship between different disease grades. In this paper, we propose a straightforward approach to enforce this constraint for the task of predicting Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) severity from eye fundus images based on the well-known notion of Cost-Sensitive classification. We expand standard classification losses with an extra term that acts as a regularizer, imposing greater penalties on predicted grades when they are farther away from the true grade associated to a particular image. Furthermore, we show how to adapt our method to the modelling of label noise in each of the sub-problems associated to DR grading, an approach we refer to as Atomic Sub-Task modeling. This yields models that can implicitly take into account the inherent noise present in DR grade annotations. Our experimental analysis on several public datasets reveals that, when a standard Convolutional Neural Network is trained using this simple strategy, improvements of 3-5% of quadratic-weighted kappa scores can be achieved at a negligible computational cost. Code to reproduce our results is released at https://github.com/agaldran/cost_sensitive_loss_classification.
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of blindness. However, no specific symptoms of early DR lead to a delayed diagnosis, which results in disease progression in patients. To determine the disease severity levels, ophthalmologists need to focus on the discriminative parts of the fundus images. In recent years, deep learning has achieved great success in medical image analysis. However, most works directly employ algorithms based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which ignore the fact that the difference among classes is subtle and gradual. Hence, we consider automatic image grading of DR as a fine-grained classification task, and construct a bilinear model to identify the pathologically discriminative areas. In order to leverage the ordinal information among classes, we use an ordinal regression method to obtain the soft labels. In addition, other than only using a categorical loss to train our network, we also introduce the metric loss to learn a more discriminative feature space. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method on two public IDRiD and DeepDR datasets.
Descriptive region features extracted by object detection networks have played an important role in the recent advancements of image captioning. However, they are still criticized for the lack of contextual information and fine-grained details, which in contrast are the merits of traditional grid features. In this paper, we introduce a novel Dual-Level Collaborative Transformer (DLCT) network to realize the complementary advantages of the two features. Concretely, in DLCT, these two features are first processed by a novelDual-way Self Attenion (DWSA) to mine their intrinsic properties, where a Comprehensive Relation Attention component is also introduced to embed the geometric information. In addition, we propose a Locality-Constrained Cross Attention module to address the semantic noises caused by the direct fusion of these two features, where a geometric alignment graph is constructed to accurately align and reinforce region and grid features. To validate our model, we conduct extensive experiments on the highly competitive MS-COCO dataset, and achieve new state-of-the-art performance on both local and online test sets, i.e., 133.8% CIDEr-D on Karpathy split and 135.4% CIDEr on the official split. Code is available at https://github.com/luo3300612/image-captioning-DLCT.
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a common retinal disease that leads to blindness. For diagnosis purposes, DR image grading aims to provide automatic DR grade classification, which is not addressed in conventional research methods of binary DR image classification. Small objects in the eye images, like lesions and microaneurysms, are essential to DR grading in medical imaging, but they could easily be influenced by other objects. To address these challenges, we propose a new deep learning architecture, called BiRA-Net, which combines the attention model for feature extraction and bilinear model for fine-grained classification. Furthermore, in considering the distance between different grades of different DR categories, we propose a new loss function, called grading loss, which leads to improved training convergence of the proposed approach. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach.