MobilenetV2-RC: a lightweight network model for retinopathy classification in retinal OCT images

Abstract Retinopathy is an important ophthalmic disease that causes blindness in the elderly population. As the global elderly demographic expands, the importance of the efficient ophthalmic healthcare system for pre-diagnosis cannot be overstated. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is considered the gold standard for ophthalmic treatment and diagnosis. OCT technologies and equipment continue to develop towards the intelligence and convenience for requirements of rapid diagnosis in the remote and poverty-stricken areas. Here, we proposed an improved MobilenetV2 lightweight model for retinopathy classification (MobilenetV2-RC), which incorporates spatial and channel reconstruction convolution and the improved convolutional block attention module attention mechanism into the framework. Not only can it effectively limit feature redundancy to reduce model parameters, but also enhance the ability of feature representation to improve classification accuracy. The parameters of the proposed model are only 1.96 M with an overall accuracy of 98.96%, which is higher 3.32% than the original MobilenetV2. Compared with ResNet18, InceptionV3, and VGG16_BN, the overall accuracy is increased by 4.6%, 6.3%, and 3.9%, respectively. The test results of UCSD and Duke open-source datasets are more remarkable. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm has strong reliability and generalization for the accurate classification of retinopathy, and a greater application prospect in the intelligent diagnosis of ophthalmology and mobile detection terminals.