AN AUTOMATED METHOD TO DETECT AGE-RELATED MACULAR DEGENERATION FROM OPTICAL COHERENCE TOMOGRAPHIC IMAGES

Abstract

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is an eye disease that affects the elderly. AMD’s prevalence is increasing as society’s population ages; thus, early detection is critical to prevent vision loss in the elderly. Arrangement of a comprehensive examination of the eye for AMD detection is a challenging task. This paper suggests a new poly scale and dual path (PSDP) convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for early-stage AMD diagnosis automatically. The proposed PSDP architecture has nine convolutional layers to classify the input image as AMD or normal. A PSDP architecture is used to enhance classification efficiency due to the high variation in size and shape of perforation present in OCT images. The poly scale approach employs filters of various sizes to extract features from local regions more effectively. Simultaneously, the dual path architecture incorporates features extracted from different CNN layers to boost features in the global regions. The sigmoid function is used to classify images into binary categories. The Mendeley data set is used to train the proposed network and tested on Mendeley, Duke, SD-OCT Noor, and OCTID data sets. The testing accuracy of the network in Mendeley, Duke, SD-OCT Noor, and OCT-ID is 99.73%,96.66%,94.89%,99.61%, respectively. The comparison with alternative approaches showed that the proposed algorithm is efficient in detecting AMD. Despite having been trained on the Mendeley data set, the proposed model exhibited good detection accuracy when tested on other data sets. This shows that the suggested model can distinguish AMD/Normal images from various data sets. As compared to other methods, the findings show that the proposed algorithm is efficient at detecting AMD. Rapid eye scanning for early detection of AMD could be possible with the proposed architecture. The proposed CNN can be applied in real-time due to its lower complexity and less learnable parameters.