Multi-label classification of fundus images with graph convolutional network and LightGBM

Early detection and treatment of retinal disorders are critical for avoiding irreversible visual impairment. Given that patients in the clinical setting may have various types of retinal illness, the development of multi-label fundus disease detection models capable of screening for multiple diseases is more in line with clinical needs. This article presented a composite model based on hybrid graph convolution for patient-level multi-label fundus illness identification. The composite model comprised a backbone module, a hybrid graph convolution module, and a classifier module. This article established the relationship between labels via graph convolution and then employed a self-attention mechanism to design a hybrid graph convolution structure. The backbone module extracted features using EfficientNet-B4, whereas the classifier module output multi-label using LightGBM. Additionally, this work investigated the input pattern of binocular images and the influence of label correlation on the model's identification performance. The proposed model MCGL-Net outperformed all other state-of-the-art methods on the publicly available ODIR dataset, with F1 reaching 91.60% on the test set. Ablation experiments were also performed in this paper. Experiments showed that the idea of hybrid graph convolutional structure and composite model designed in this paper promotes the model performance under any backbone CNN. The adoption of hybrid graph convolution can increase the F1 by 2.39% in trials using EfficientNet-B4 as the backbone. The composite model had a higher F1 index by 5.42% than the single EfficientNet-B4 model.