MSCE-LT: Multi-Label Supervised Contrastive Enhancement for Long-Tailed Retinal Diseases Recognition

Retinal diseases are leading causes of blindness globally. In real-world clinical practice, a patient may suffer from multiple retinal diseases, and these diseases are often under a long-tailed distribution, which poses significant challenges for accurate diagnosis. In this work, we propose a novel contrastive learning(CL)-based framework for multi-label retinal disease recognition. It consists of two parallel branches, a multi-label supervised contrastive learning branch and a classifier branch. The positive sets are created by the extent of proportional label overlap between samples and the anchor in calculating contrastive loss. For minority information enhancement, we design a hybrid-proxy model to generate class-dependent proxies, which are updated alongside the network. We capture rich relations samples, proxies, and labels by introducing the hybrid sample-proxy contrastive loss. Taking both label co-occurrence and data imbalance into consideration, we further utilize Distribution Balanced (DB) binary cross-entropy loss to guide the classifier branch learning. Experimental results on four public retinal disease datasets have demonstrated the superiority and effectiveness of our method.