The role of deep learning in the diagnosis of ocular diseases

Abstract

Deep Learning (DL) revolutionized a wide variety of research fields and applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the last years. Computer vision is among those fields that witnessed a stronger impact, especially in some tasks like image equalization, classification and segmentation, that have several applications in medical imaging. Such applications often focus on microscopy images, but they can be successfully extended to other fields, like the detection of diseases involving the ocular surface and the cornea.One of the reasons of the success of deep learning applied to image processing relies in the end‐to‐end data‐driven approach. This means that the whole image processing and classification/segmentation pipeline can be adapted to the data being processed. This is particularly powerful when dealing with medical images, whose processing is often based on the detection of low‐ and mid‐level patterns that might be difficult to define in a formal manner. This means that deep learning has the chance to select and consider some image elements that would be nearly impossible to define using standard computer vision techniques. However, this becomes possible if large amounts of data are available for training the network, which became reality in the last years thanks to the wide digitalization of medical systems, including ophthalmology equipment.Based on a substantial amount of literature that has rapidly grown in the last years, this talk will focus on the new perspectives of eye disease diagnosis that were opened by the advent of deep learning. At the same time, the limitations and risks that must be considered in the development of DL‐based medical systems, like overfitting and lack of generalization, will be highlighted and discussed. Keeping track of such limitations is crucial in order not to consider DL as a sort of magic box, but rather, as powerful image analysis and processing tool.The talk will also provide a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the diagnosis systems currently available that exploit DL and AI systems. The current and future impact of automatic image processing systems dedicated to ophthalmology will also be discussed. When automatic medical image analysis will be widely available, the patterns of medical diagnosis will need to change, taking advantage of the possibility to perform larger screenings that will be automatically processed.