1. A foundation model for generalizable disease detection from retinal images.
- Author
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Zhou Y, Chia MA, Wagner SK, Ayhan MS, Williamson DJ, Struyven RR, Liu T, Xu M, Lozano MG, Woodward-Court P, Kihara Y, Altmann A, Lee AY, Topol EJ, Denniston AK, Alexander DC, and Keane PA
- Subjects
- Humans, Heart Failure complications, Heart Failure diagnosis, Myocardial Infarction complications, Myocardial Infarction diagnosis, Supervised Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Eye Diseases complications, Eye Diseases diagnostic imaging, Retina diagnostic imaging
- Abstract
Medical artificial intelligence (AI) offers great potential for recognizing signs of health conditions in retinal images and expediting the diagnosis of eye diseases and systemic disorders
1 . However, the development of AI models requires substantial annotation and models are usually task-specific with limited generalizability to different clinical applications2 . Here, we present RETFound, a foundation model for retinal images that learns generalizable representations from unlabelled retinal images and provides a basis for label-efficient model adaptation in several applications. Specifically, RETFound is trained on 1.6 million unlabelled retinal images by means of self-supervised learning and then adapted to disease detection tasks with explicit labels. We show that adapted RETFound consistently outperforms several comparison models in the diagnosis and prognosis of sight-threatening eye diseases, as well as incident prediction of complex systemic disorders such as heart failure and myocardial infarction with fewer labelled data. RETFound provides a generalizable solution to improve model performance and alleviate the annotation workload of experts to enable broad clinical AI applications from retinal imaging., (© 2023. The Author(s).)- Published
- 2023
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