Predicting the progression of ophthalmic disease based on slit-lamp images using a deep temporal sequence network

Ocular images play an essential role in ophthalmology. Current research mainly focuses on computer-aided diagnosis using slit-lamp images, however few studies have been done to predict the progression of ophthalmic disease. Therefore exploring an effective approach of prediction can help to plan treatment strategies and to provide early warning for the patients. In this study, we present an end-to-end temporal sequence network (TempSeq-Net) to automatically predict the progression of ophthalmic disease, which includes employing convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract high-level features from consecutive slit-lamp images and applying long short term memory (LSTM) method to mine the temporal relationship of features. First, we comprehensively compare six potential combinations of CNNs and LSTM (or recurrent neural network) in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, to obtain the optimal TempSeq-Net model. Second, we analyze the impacts of sequence lengths on model’s performance which help to evaluate their stability and validity and to determine the appropriate range of sequence lengths. The quantitative results demonstrated that our proposed model offers exceptional performance with mean accuracy (92.22), sensitivity (88.55), specificity (94.31) and AUC (97.18). Moreover, the model achieves real-time prediction with only 27.6ms for single sequence, and simultaneously predicts sequence data with lengths of 3–5. Our study provides a promising strategy for the progression of ophthalmic disease, and has the potential to be applied in other medical fields.