Paper ID: 2404.13388

Diagnosis of Multiple Fundus Disorders Amidst a Scarcity of Medical Experts Via Self-supervised Machine Learning

Yong Liu, Mengtian Kang, Shuo Gao, Chi Zhang, Ying Liu, Shiming Li, Yue Qi, Arokia Nathan, Wenjun Xu, Chenyu Tang, Edoardo Occhipinti, Mayinuer Yusufu, Ningli Wang, Weiling Bai, Luigi Occhipinti

Fundus diseases are major causes of visual impairment and blindness worldwide, especially in underdeveloped regions, where the shortage of ophthalmologists hinders timely diagnosis. AI-assisted fundus image analysis has several advantages, such as high accuracy, reduced workload, and improved accessibility, but it requires a large amount of expert-annotated data to build reliable models. To address this dilemma, we propose a general self-supervised machine learning framework that can handle diverse fundus diseases from unlabeled fundus images. Our method's AUC surpasses existing supervised approaches by 15.7%, and even exceeds performance of a single human expert. Furthermore, our model adapts well to various datasets from different regions, races, and heterogeneous image sources or qualities from multiple cameras or devices. Our method offers a label-free general framework to diagnose fundus diseases, which could potentially benefit telehealth programs for early screening of people at risk of vision loss.

Submitted: Apr 20, 2024