Utilization of big data classification models in digitally enhanced optical coherence tomography for medical diagnostics

Priti Bansal, Nipun Harjai, Mohammad Saif, Saahil Hussain Mugloo, Preeti Kaur

Abstract: With the advancement in modern imaging techniques like CT scan, MRI, PET scan etc., a vast amount of data is generated every day in the field of healthcare. Big data contains hidden information, which necessitates the development of intelligent systems to analyze it and extract relevant information, allowing for accurate and cost-effective decisions in the medical field. By utilizing the untapped potential of the big data available in the medical field, very precise models can be developed for the medical diagnosis of retinal diseases. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging test that captures different, distinctive layers of the retina and optic nerve in a living eye to map and measure their thickness, that helps diagnose various retinal disorders. With the advancement of the application of deep learning-based techniques in the field of medical sciences, the use of convolutional neural network (CNN) based approaches for disease detection is gaining popularity. While the manual examination of 3D OCT images for the diagnosis of retinal disorders requires extensive time and expert intervention, the use of CNNs provides an effective automated option that provides results with higher accuracy while also reducing the time involved in the overall process. In this paper, we have implemented the aforementioned idea by proposing OCT-CNN, a CNN architecture, that automatically classifies retinal OCT images and identifies potential disorders in a living eye. Several techniques have been employed to enhance the performance of the proposed approach, including digital enhancement of the images, dropout regularization, adaptive learning rates, and early stopping of training to attain optimal performance. The performance of the proposed OCT-CNN is evaluated on the UCSD dataset against several popular deep CNN architectures and existing state-of-the-art approaches to automatic retinal OCT classification. The proposed OCT-CNN attains the best performance on all evaluated metrics, pushing the classification accuracies to 99.28% on CNV, 99.9% on DME, 99.38% on DRUSEN, and 100% on NORMAL images, indicating its superiority over existing state-of-the-art techniques.