Deep Learning for Prediction of AMD Progression: A Pilot Study

Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2019 Feb 1;60(2):712-722. doi: 10.1167/iovs.18-25325.

Abstract

Purpose: To develop and assess a method for predicting the likelihood of converting from early/intermediate to advanced wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) using optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging and methods of deep learning.

Methods: Seventy-one eyes of 71 patients with confirmed early/intermediate AMD with contralateral wet AMD were imaged with OCT three times over 2 years (baseline, year 1, year 2). These eyes were divided into two groups: eyes that had not converted to wet AMD (n = 40) at year 2 and those that had (n = 31). Two deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) were evaluated using 5-fold cross validation on the OCT data at baseline to attempt to predict which eyes would convert to advanced AMD at year 2: (1) VGG16, a popular CNN for image recognition was fine-tuned, and (2) a novel, simplified CNN architecture was trained from scratch. Preprocessing was added in the form of a segmentation-based normalization to reduce variance in the data and improve performance.

Results: Our new architecture, AMDnet, with preprocessing, achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) of 0.89 at the B-scan level and 0.91 for volumes. Results for VGG16, an established CNN architecture, with preprocessing were 0.82 for B-scans/0.87 for volumes versus 0.66 for B-scans/0.69 for volumes without preprocessing.

Conclusions: A CNN with layer segmentation-based preprocessing shows strong predictive power for the progression of early/intermediate AMD to advanced AMD. Use of the preprocessing was shown to improve performance regardless of the network architecture.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Deep Learning*
  • Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Disease Progression
  • Female
  • Follow-Up Studies
  • Humans
  • Machine Learning
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Pilot Projects
  • ROC Curve
  • Tomography, Optical Coherence / methods
  • Wet Macular Degeneration / diagnosis*