Multi-Modal Learning Using Physicians Diagnostics for Optical Coherence Tomography Classification

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a framework that incorporates experts diagnostics and insights into the analysis of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) using multi-modal learning. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, we create a medical diagnostic attribute dataset to improve disease classification using OCT. Although there have been successful attempts to deploy machine learning for disease classification in OCT, such methodologies lack the experts insights. We argue that injecting ophthalmological assessments as another supervision in a learning framework is of great importance for the machine learning process to perform accurate and interpretable classification. We demonstrate the proposed framework through comprehensive experiments that compare the effectiveness of combining diagnostic attribute features with latent visual representations and show that they surpass the state-of-the-art approach. Finally, we analyze the proposed dual-stream architecture and provide an insight that determine the components that contribute most to classification performance.