Automated interpretation of retinal vein occlusion based on fundus fluorescein angiography images using deep learning: A retrospective, multi-center study

PurposeFundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) is the gold standard for retinal vein occlusion (RVO) diagnosis. This study aims to develop a deep learning-based system to diagnose and classify RVO using FFA images, addressing the challenges of time-consuming and variable interpretations by ophthalmologists.Methods4028 FFA images of 467 eyes from 463 patients were collected and annotated. Three convolutional neural networks (CNN) models (ResNet50, VGG19, InceptionV3) were trained to generate the label of image quality, eye, location, phase, lesions, diagnosis, and macular involvement. The performance of the models was evaluated by accuracy, precision, recall, F-1 score, the area under the curve, confusion matrix, human-machine comparison, and Clinical validation on three external data sets.ResultsThe InceptionV3 model outperformed ResNet50 and VGG19 in labeling and interpreting FFA images for RVO diagnosis, achieving 77.63% to 96.45% accuracy for basic information labels and 81.72% to 96.45% for RVO-relevant labels. The comparison between the best CNN and ophthalmologists showed up to 19% accuracy improvement with the inceptionV3.ConclusionThis study developed a deep learning model capable of automatically multi-label and multi-classification of FFA images for RVO diagnosis. The proposed system is anticipated to serve as a new tool for diagnosing RVO in places short of medical resources.