Uncertainty-Aware Deep Learning Methods for Robust Diabetic Retinopathy Classification

Thumbnail Image

Access rights

openAccess

URL

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

Date

2022

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

13
76669-76681

Series

IEEE Access, Volume 10

Abstract

Automatic classification of diabetic retinopathy from retinal images has been increasingly studied using deep neural networks with impressive results. However, there is clinical need for estimating uncertainty in the classifications, a shortcoming of modern neural networks. Recently, approximate Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have been proposed for this task, but previous studies have only considered the binary referable/non-referable diabetic retinopathy classification applied to benchmark datasets. We present novel results for 9 BNNs by systematically investigating a clinical dataset and 5-class classification scheme, together with benchmark datasets and binary classification scheme. Moreover, we derive a connection between entropy-based uncertainty measure and classifier risk, from which we develop a novel uncertainty measure. We observe that the previously proposed entropy-based uncertainty measure improves performance on the clinical dataset for the binary classification scheme, but not to such an extent as on the benchmark datasets. It improves performance in the clinical 5-class classification scheme for the benchmark datasets, but not for the clinical dataset. Our novel uncertainty measure generalizes to the clinical dataset and to one benchmark dataset. Our findings suggest that BNNs can be utilized for uncertainty estimation in classifying diabetic retinopathy on clinical data, though proper uncertainty measures are needed to optimize the desired performance measure. In addition, methods developed for benchmark datasets might not generalize to clinical datasets.

Description

Funding Information: The work of Joel Jaskari, Jaakko Sahlsten, and Kimmo K. Kaski was supported in part by the Academy of Finland under Project 345449. Publisher Copyright: © 2013 IEEE.

Keywords

Approximate Bayesian neural networks, deep learning, diabetic retinopathy, reject option classification, uncertainty estimation

Other note

Citation

Jaskari, J, Sahlsten, J, Damoulas, T, Knoblauch, J, Sarkka, S, Karkkainen, L, Hietala, K & Kaski, K K 2022, ' Uncertainty-Aware Deep Learning Methods for Robust Diabetic Retinopathy Classification ', IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 76669-76681 . https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3192024