JointViT: Modeling Oxygen Saturation Levels with Joint Supervision on Long-Tailed OCTA

Zeyu Zhang, Xuyin Qi, Mingxi Chen, Guangxi Li, Ryan Pham, Ayub Qassim, Ella Berry, Zhibin Liao, Owen Siggs, Robert A. McLaughlin, Jamie Craig, Minh-Son To

Abstract: The oxygen saturation level in the blood (\(\text {SaO}_\text {2}\)) is crucial for health, particularly in relation to sleep-related breathing disorders. However, continuous monitoring of \(\text {SaO}_\text {2}\) is time-consuming and highly variable depending on patients’ conditions. Recently, optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) has shown promising development in rapidly and effectively screening eye-related lesions, offering the potential for diagnosing sleep-related disorders. To bridge this gap, our paper presents three key contributions. Firstly, we propose JointViT, a novel model based on the Vision Transformer architecture, incorporating a joint loss function for supervision. Secondly, we introduce a balancing augmentation technique during data preprocessing to improve the model’s performance, particularly on the long-tail distribution within the OCTA dataset. Lastly, through comprehensive experiments on the OCTA dataset, our proposed method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, achieving improvements of up to 12.28% in overall accuracy. This advancement lays the groundwork for the future utilization of OCTA in diagnosing sleep-related disorders.