Machine learning enabled diagnosis and lesion localization for nascent geographic atrophy in age-related macular degeneration

A system comprising:

• a non-transitory memory;
• and
• a hardware processor coupled with the non-transitory memory and configured to read instructions from the non-transitory memory to cause the system to:
• receive an optical coherence tomography (OCT) volume image of a retina of a subject;
• generate, via a deep learning model, an output using the OCT volume image in which the output indicates whether nascent geographic atrophy is detected;
• generate a map output for the deep learning model using a saliency mapping algorithm,
• wherein the map output indicates a level of contribution of a set of regions in the OCT volume image to the output generated by the deep learning model;
• and
• display the map output.

A system comprising:

• a non-transitory memory;
• and
• a hardware processor coupled with the non-transitory memory and configured to read instructions from the non-transitory memory to cause the system to:
• train a deep learning model using a training dataset that includes training OCT images that have been labeled as evidencing nascent geographic atrophy or not evidencing nascent geographic atrophy to form a trained deep learning model;
• receive an optical coherence tomography (OCT) volume image of a retina of a subject;
• generate, via the trained deep learning model, a classification score using the OCT volume image in which the classification score indicates whether nascent geographic atrophy is detected;
• generate a saliency volume map for the OCT volume image using a saliency mapping algorithm, wherein the saliency volume map indicates a level of contribution of a set of regions in the OCT volume image to a diagnosis of geographic atrophy generated by the deep learning model;
• detect a set of potential biomarker regions in the OCT volume image using the saliency volume map;
• and
• generate a report that confirms that nascent geographic atrophy is detected when at least one potential biomarker region of the set of potential biomarker regions meets a set of criteria and when the classification score meets a threshold.