Leveraging Multimodal Fusion for Enhanced Diagnosis of Multiple Retinal Diseases in Ultra-wide OCTA

Ultra-wide optical coherence tomography angiography (UW-OCTA) is an emerging imaging technique that offers significant advantages over traditional OCTA by providing an exceptionally wide scanning range of up to 24 x 20 $mm^{2}$, covering both the anterior and posterior regions of the retina. However, the currently accessible UW-OCTA datasets suffer from limited comprehensive hierarchical information and corresponding disease annotations. To address this limitation, we have curated the pioneering M3OCTA dataset, which is the first multimodal (i.e., multilayer), multi-disease, and widest field-of-view UW-OCTA dataset. Furthermore, the effective utilization of multi-layer ultra-wide ocular vasculature information from UW-OCTA remains underdeveloped. To tackle this challenge, we propose the first cross-modal fusion framework that leverages multi-modal information for diagnosing multiple diseases. Through extensive experiments conducted on our openly available M3OCTA dataset, we demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of our method, both in fixed and varying modalities settings. The construction of the M3OCTA dataset, the first multimodal OCTA dataset encompassing multiple diseases, aims to advance research in the ophthalmic image analysis community.

CauDR: A Causality-inspired Domain Generalization Framework for Fundus-based Diabetic Retinopathy Grading

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the most common diabetic complication, which usually leads to retinal damage, vision loss, and even blindness. A computer-aided DR grading system has a significant impact on helping ophthalmologists with rapid screening and diagnosis. Recent advances in fundus photography have precipitated the development of novel retinal imaging cameras and their subsequent implementation in clinical practice. However, most deep learning-based algorithms for DR grading demonstrate limited generalization across domains. This inferior performance stems from variance in imaging protocols and devices inducing domain shifts. We posit that declining model performance between domains arises from learning spurious correlations in the data. Incorporating do-operations from causality analysis into model architectures may mitigate this issue and improve generalizability. Specifically, a novel universal structural causal model (SCM) was proposed to analyze spurious correlations in fundus imaging. Building on this, a causality-inspired diabetic retinopathy grading framework named CauDR was developed to eliminate spurious correlations and achieve more generalizable DR diagnostics. Furthermore, existing datasets were reorganized into 4DR benchmark for DG scenario. Results demonstrate the effectiveness and the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of CauDR.