Investigating the Impact of Semi-Supervised Learning Methods to Improve the Quality of Diagnosis of Retinal Diseases from OCT Images

Background: Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is a leading cause of irreversible vision loss, particularly in the elderly. Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), a noninvasive imaging modality, is widely used for retinal disease detection. However, the limited availability of labeled OCT datasets poses a significant challenge, making semi-supervised learning a promising approach. This study introduces a novel Iterative Teacher-Student (ITS) framework, which refines pseudo-labeling strategies to improve AMD detection accuracy, particularly in low-data scenarios. Methods: Initially, an optimal supervised model based on EfficientNet was developed to classify AMD using a dataset from Noor Eye Hospital, consisting of 16,822 OCT images. The dataset size was then progressively reduced to 70%, 50%, 20%, and 5% to evaluate model performance under data scarcity. Unlike conventional semi-supervised learning approaches, our ITS framework iteratively refines pseudo-labels, ensuring more reliable knowledge transfer from teacher to student models. Results: The optimized supervised model achieved 87.14% accuracy in AMD classification. As dataset size decreased to 20% and 5%, accuracy declined to 77.05% and 54.78%, respectively. Implementing the ITS framework improved accuracy to 88.56% at 20% and 64.15% at 5%, outperforming traditional semi-supervised methods. Conclusions: This study highlights the potential of semi-supervised learning, particularly our iterative teacher-student approach, to enhance AMD detection when labeled OCT data are scarce. The proposed framework introduces a novel iterative refinement strategy, which can serve as a foundation for future research in retinal disease diagnosis with limited labeled datasets.