Quality and content analysis of fundus images using deep learning

Abstract

Automatic retinal image analysis has remained an important topic of research in the last ten years. Various algorithms and methods have been developed for analysing retinal images. The majority of these methods use public retinal image databases for performance evaluation without first examining the retinal image quality. Therefore, the performance metrics reported by these methods are inconsistent. In this article, we propose a deep learning-based approach to assess the quality of input retinal images. The method begins with a deep learning-based classification that identifies the image quality in terms of sharpness, illumination and homogeneity, followed by an unsupervised second stage that evaluates the field definition and content in the image. Using the inter-database cross-validation technique, our proposed method achieved overall sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value and accuracy of above 90% when tested on 7007 images collected from seven different public databases, including our own developed database—the UoA-DR database. Therefore, our proposed method is generalised and robust, making it more suitable than alternative methods for adoption in clinical practice.