Applying novel self-supervised learning for early detection of
retinopathy of prematurity
Abstract
Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) mainly occurs in premature infants with
low birth weight, and it is the leading cause of childhood blindness.
Early and accurate ROP diagnosis is imperative for appropriate
treatment. However, less research concentrates on early-stage ROP
diagnosis based on limited-labeled images in an imbalanced dataset. To
address the dilemma, this study proposed a novel self-supervised
network, MOCO-MIM, for early ROP grading. The proposed classification
network was evaluated on a total of 553 labeled fundus images from 89
preterm infants. The trained network achieved a test accuracy of 98.29%
and an AUC score of 97.6% for three stages of grading. The adopted
method is verified that the proposed method can be detected early stages
of ROP more efficiently and grade the severity more accurately based on
limited-labeled fundus images, which is superior to the existing
state-of-the-art methods.