A self-adaptive deep learning method for automated eye laterality detection based on color fundus photography

PURPOSE: To provide a self-adaptive deep learning (DL) method to automatically detect the eye laterality based on fundus images. METHODS: A total of 18394 fundus images with real-world eye laterality labels were used for model development and internal validation. A separate dataset of 2000 fundus images with eye laterality labeled manually was used for external validation. A DL model was developed based on a fine-tuned Inception-V3 network with self-adaptive strategy. The area under receiver operator characteristic curve (AUC) with sensitivity and specificity and confusion matrix were applied to assess the model performance. The class activation map (CAM) was used for model visualization. RESULTS: In the external validation (N = 2000, 50% labeled as left eye), the AUC of the DL model for overall eye laterality detection was 0.995 (95% CI, 0.993–0.997) with an accuracy of 99.13%. Specifically for left eye detection, the sensitivity was 99.00% (95% CI, 98.11%-99.49%) and the specificity was 99.10% (95% CI, 98.23%-99.56%). Nineteen images were wrongly classified as compared to the human labels: 12 were due to human wrong labelling, while 7 were due to poor image quality. The CAM showed that the region of interest for eye laterality detection was mainly the optic disc and surrounding areas. CONCLUSION: We proposed a self-adaptive DL method with a high performance in detecting eye laterality based on fundus images. Results of our findings were based on real world labels and thus had practical significance in clinical settings.