Ophthalmic Biomarker Detection Using Ensembled Vision Transformers -- Winning Solution to IEEE SPS VIP Cup 2023

This report outlines our approach in the IEEE SPS VIP Cup 2023: Ophthalmic Biomarker Detection competition. Our primary objective in this competition was to identify biomarkers from Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images obtained from a diverse range of patients. Using robust augmentations and 5-fold cross-validation, we trained two vision transformer-based models: MaxViT and EVA-02, and ensembled them at inference time. We find MaxViT's use of convolution layers followed by strided attention to be better suited for the detection of local features while EVA-02's use of normal attention mechanism and knowledge distillation is better for detecting global features. Ours was the best-performing solution in the competition, achieving a patient-wise F1 score of 0.814 in the first phase and 0.8527 in the second and final phase of VIP Cup 2023, scoring 3.8% higher than the next-best solution.