A Transfer Learning Based Model Ensemble Method for Image Quality Assessment and Diabetic Retinopathy Grading

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a chronic complication of diabetes that damages the retina and is one of the leading causes of blindness. In the process of diabetic retinopathy analysis, it is necessary to first assess the quality of images and select the images with better imaging quality. Then DR analysis, such as DR grading, is performed. Therefore, it is crucial to implement a flexible and robust method to achieve automatic image quality assessment and DR grading. In deep learning, due to the high complexity, weak individual differences, and noise interference of ultra-wide optical coherence tomography angiography (UW-OCTA) images, individual classification networks have not been able to achieve satisfactory accuracy on such tasks and do not generalize well. Therefore, in this work, we use multiple models ensemble methods, by ensemble different baseline networks of RegNet and EfficientNetV2, which can simply and significantly improve the prediction accuracy and robustness. A transfer learning based solution is proposed for the problem of insufficient diabetic image data for retinopathy. After doing feature enhancement on the images, the UW-OCTA image task will be fine-tuned by combining the network pre-trained with ImageNet data. our method achieves a quadratic weighted kappa of 0.778 and AUC of 0.887 in image quality assessment (IQA) and 0.807 kappa and AUC of 0.875 in diabetic retinopathy grading.