Paper ID: 2310.14005

Ophthalmic Biomarker Detection Using Ensembled Vision Transformers -- Winning Solution to IEEE SPS VIP Cup 2023

H. A. Z. Sameen Shahgir, Khondker Salman Sayeed, Tanjeem Azwad Zaman, Md. Asif Haider, Sheikh Saifur Rahman Jony, M. Sohel Rahman

This report outlines our approach in the IEEE SPS VIP Cup 2023: Ophthalmic Biomarker Detection competition. Our primary objective in this competition was to identify biomarkers from Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images obtained from a diverse range of patients. Using robust augmentations and 5-fold cross-validation, we trained two vision transformer-based models: MaxViT and EVA-02, and ensembled them at inference time. We find MaxViT's use of convolution layers followed by strided attention to be better suited for the detection of local features while EVA-02's use of normal attention mechanism and knowledge distillation is better for detecting global features. Ours was the best-performing solution in the competition, achieving a patient-wise F1 score of 0.814 in the first phase and 0.8527 in the second and final phase of VIP Cup 2023, scoring 3.8% higher than the next-best solution.

Submitted: Oct 21, 2023