Deep Learning Transformers in Diabetic Retinopathy Detection

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

URL

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis

Date

2023-12-11

Department

Major/Subject

Complex Systems

Mcode

SCI3060

Degree programme

Master’s Programme in Life Science Technologies

Language

en

Pages

39

Series

Abstract

Diabetic retinopathy is a progressive ocular disease linked with diabetes mellitus, which can lead to blindness. The constantly high blood glucose levels caused by diabetes damage the vascular system, which can be seen e.g. as damaged retinal blood vessels. Diabetic retinopathy can be detected by inspecting fundus images for any visual changes. This time-consuming process, executed by ophthalmologists, can be automated by creating efficient computer vision algorithms. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been established as the state-of-the-art architecture in computer vision tasks. However, an architecture based on the self-attention mechanism, called Transformer, has been recently utilized in computer vision with promising results, albeit requiring significantly larger training datasets and computational resources than traditional CNNs. In this thesis, three Transformer architectures, i.e., Swin, Vision Transformer-B/16 and Vision Transformer-B/8 are compared to a state-of-the-art CNN model called EfficientNet-B6, in the detection of the severity of diabetic retinopathy from patients’ fundus images. The results of this thesis indicate that the Transformer architecture has potential to improve upon the CNN in diabetic retinopathy detection. However, the amount of training data and required computational resources are challenges yet to be solved.

Description

Supervisor

Marttinen, Pekka

Thesis advisor

Kaski, Kimmo
Jaskari, Joel

Keywords

deep learning, diabetic retinopathy, transformer, computer vision

Other note

Citation