Computer-aided diagnosis of retinopathy based on vision transformer

Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) and Diabetic Macular Edema (DME) are two common retinal diseases for elder people that may ultimately cause irreversible blindness. Timely and accurate diagnosis is essential for the treatment of these diseases. In recent years, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) has been deeply investigated and effectively used for rapid and early diagnosis. In this paper, we proposed a method of CAD using vision transformer to analyze optical coherence tomography (OCT) images and to automatically discriminate AMD, DME, and normal eyes. A classification accuracy of 99.69% was achieved. After the model pruning, the recognition time reached 0.010 s and the classification accuracy did not drop. Compared with the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) image classification models (VGG16, Resnet50, Densenet121, and EfficientNet), vision transformer after pruning exhibited better recognition ability. Results show that vision transformer is an improved alternative to diagnose retinal diseases more accurately.