A Novel Network With Parallel Resolution Encoders for the Diagnosis of Corneal Diseases

Objective:
To propose a deep-learning network for the diagnosis of two corneal diseases: Fuchs’ endothlelial dystrophy and keratoconus, based on optical coherence tomography (OCT) images of the cornea.
Methods:
In this paper, we propose a novel network with parallel resolution-specific encoders and composite classification features to directly diagnose Fuchs’ endothelial dystrophy and keratoconus using OCT images. Our proposed network consists of a multi-resolution input, multiple parallel encoders, and a composite of convolutional and dense features for classification. The purpose of using parallel resolution-specific encoders is to perform multi-resolution feature fusion. Also, using composite classification features enhances the dense feature learning. We implemented other related networks for comparison with our network and performed k-fold cross-validation on a dataset of 16,721 OCT images. We used saliency maps and sensitivity analysis to visualize our proposed network.
Results:
The proposed network outperformed other networks with an image classification accuracy of 0.91 and a scan classification accuracy of 0.94. The visualizations show that our network learned better features than other networks.
Significance:
The proposed methods can potentially be a step towards the early diagnosis of corneal diseases, which is necessary to prevent their progression, hence, prevent loss of vision.