Detecting Anomalies in Retinal Diseases Using Generative, Discriminative, and Self-supervised Deep Learning

This study suggests when abnormal (diseased) data, ie, referable diabetic retinopathy in this study, were not available for training of retinal diagnostic systems wherein only nonreferable diabetic retinopathy was used for training, anomaly detection techniques were useful in identifying images with and without referable diabetic retinopathy. This suggests that anomaly detectors may be used to detect retinal diseases in more generalized settings and potentially could play a role in screening of populations for retinal diseases or identifying novel diseases and phenotyping or detecting unusual presentations of common retinal diseases.