Development and validation of a 3-D deep learning system for diabetic macular oedema classification on optical coherence tomography images

Objectives To develop and validate an automated diabetic macular oedema (DME) classification system based on the images from different three-dimensional optical coherence tomography (3-D OCT) devices.Design A multicentre, platform-based development study using retrospective and cross-sectional data....

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Main Authors: Mingzhi Zhang, Tsz Kin Ng, Yi Zheng, Guihua Zhang, Jian-Wei Lin, Ji Wang, Jie Ji, Peiwen Xie, Yongqun Xiong, Hanfu Wu, Cui Liu, Huishan Zhu, Jinqu Huang, Leixian Lin
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: BMJ Publishing Group 2025-05-01
Series:BMJ Open
Online Access:https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/15/5/e099167.full
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Summary:Objectives To develop and validate an automated diabetic macular oedema (DME) classification system based on the images from different three-dimensional optical coherence tomography (3-D OCT) devices.Design A multicentre, platform-based development study using retrospective and cross-sectional data. Data were subjected to a two-level grading system by trained graders and a retina specialist, and categorised into three types: no DME, non-centre-involved DME and centre-involved DME (CI-DME). The 3-D convolutional neural networks algorithm was used for DME classification system development. The deep learning (DL) performance was compared with the diabetic retinopathy experts.Setting Data were collected from Joint Shantou International Eye Center of Shantou University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Chaozhou People’s Hospital and The Second Affiliated Hospital of Shantou University Medical College from January 2010 to December 2023.Participants 7790 volumes of 7146 eyes from 4254 patients were annotated, of which 6281 images were used as the development set and 1509 images were used as the external validation set, split based on the centres.Main outcomes Accuracy, F1-score, sensitivity, specificity, area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and Cohen’s kappa were calculated to evaluate the performance of the DL algorithm.Results In classifying DME with non-DME, our model achieved an AUROCs of 0.990 (95% CI 0.983 to 0.996) and 0.916 (95% CI 0.902 to 0.930) for hold-out testing dataset and external validation dataset, respectively. To distinguish CI-DME from non-centre-involved-DME, our model achieved AUROCs of 0.859 (95% CI 0.812 to 0.906) and 0.881 (95% CI 0.859 to 0.902), respectively. In addition, our system showed comparable performance (Cohen’s κ: 0.85 and 0.75) to the retina experts (Cohen’s κ: 0.58–0.92 and 0.70–0.71).Conclusions Our DL system achieved high accuracy in multiclassification tasks on DME classification with 3-D OCT images, which can be applied to population-based DME screening.
ISSN:2044-6055