Multiscale Color Guided Attention Ensemble Classifier for Age-Related Macular Degeneration using Concurrent Fundus and Optical Coherence Tomography Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multiscale color-guided attention ensemble classifier that combines fundus and OCT images using transfer learning and color space embeddings to improve age-related macular degeneration diagnosis.

Contribution

It proposes a novel multiscale color space encoder with attention mechanism for multi-modality AMD classification, integrating features from fundus and OCT images.

Findings

Outperforms existing models on the Project Macula dataset.

Effectively extracts and combines multi-scale features from different modalities.

Demonstrates improved accuracy in AMD classification.

Abstract

Automatic diagnosis techniques have evolved to identify age-related macular degeneration (AMD) by employing single modality Fundus images or optical coherence tomography (OCT). To classify ocular diseases, fundus and OCT images are the most crucial imaging modalities used in the clinical setting. Most deep learning-based techniques are established on a single imaging modality, which contemplates the ocular disorders to a specific extent and disregards other modality that comprises exhaustive information among distinct imaging modalities. This paper proposes a modality-specific multiscale color space embedding integrated with the attention mechanism based on transfer learning for classification (MCGAEc), which can efficiently extract the distinct modality information at various scales using the distinct color spaces. In this work, we first introduce the modality-specific multiscale color space encoder model, which includes diverse feature representations by integrating distinct characteristic color spaces on a multiscale into a unified framework. The extracted features from the prior encoder module are incorporated with the attention mechanism to extract the global features representation, which is integrated with the prior extracted features and transferred to the random forest classifier for the classification of AMD. To analyze the performance of the proposed MCGAEc method, a publicly available multi-modality dataset from Project Macula for AMD is utilized and compared with the existing models.