Self-Adaptive Transfer Learning for Multicenter Glaucoma Classification in Fundus Retina Images

The early diagnosis and screening of glaucoma are important for patients to receive treatment in time and maintain eyesight. Nowadays, deep learning (DL) based models have been successfully used for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of glaucoma from retina fundus images. However, a DL model pre-trained using a dataset from one hospital center may have poor performance on a dataset from another new hospital center and therefore its applications in the real scene are limited. In this paper, we propose a self-adaptive transfer learning (SATL) strategy to fill the domain gap between multicenter datasets. Specifically, the encoder of a DL model that is pre-trained on the source domain is used to initialize the encoder of a reconstruction model. Then, the reconstruction model is trained using only unlabeled image data from the target domain, which makes the encoder in the model adapt itself to extract useful high-level features both for target domain images encoding and glaucoma classification, simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SATL strategy is effective in the domain adaptation task between a private and two public glaucoma diagnosis datasets, i.e. pri-RFG, REFUGE, and LAG. Moreover, the proposed strategy is completely independent of the source domain data, which meets the real scene application and the privacy protection policy.