KFWC: A Knowledge-Driven Deep Learning Model for Fine-grained Classification of Wet-AMD

Automated diagnosis using deep neural networks can help ophthalmologists detect the blinding eye disease wet Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). Wet-AMD has two similar subtypes, Neovascular AMD and Polypoidal Choroidal Vessels (PCV). However, due to the difficulty in data collection and the similarity between images, most studies have only achieved the coarse-grained classification of wet-AMD rather than a finer-grained one of wet-AMD subtypes. To solve this issue, in this paper we propose a Knowledge-driven Fine-grained Wet-AMD Classification Model (KFWC), to classify fine-grained diseases with insufficient data. With the introduction of a priori knowledge of 10 lesion signs of input images into the KFWC, we aim to accelerate the KFWC by means of multi-label classification pre-training, to locate the decisive image features in the fine-grained disease classification task and therefore achieve better classification. Simultaneously, the KFWC can also provide good interpretability and effectively alleviate the pressure of data collection and annotation in the field of fine-grained disease classification for wet-AMD. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the KFWC which reaches 99.71% in AU-ROC scores, and its considerable improvements over the data-driven w/o Knowledge and ophthalmologists, with the rates of 6.69% over the strongest baseline and 4.14% over ophthalmologists.