Deep Neural Network-Based Method for Detecting Central Retinal Vein Occlusion Using Ultrawide-Field Fundus Ophthalmoscopy

The aim of this study is to assess the performance of two machine-learning technologies, namely, deep learning (DL) and support vector machine (SVM) algorithms, for detecting central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO) in ultrawide-field fundus images. Images from 125 CRVO patients (n=125 images) and 202 non-CRVO normal subjects (n=238 images) were included in this study. Training to construct the DL model using deep convolutional neural network algorithms was provided using ultrawide-field fundus images. The SVM uses scikit-learn library with a radial basis function kernel. The diagnostic abilities of DL and the SVM were compared by assessing their sensitivity, specificity, and area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic curve for CRVO. For diagnosing CRVO, the DL model had a sensitivity of 98.4% (95% confidence interval (CI), 94.3–99.8%) and a specificity of 97.9% (95% CI, 94.6–99.1%) with an AUC of 0.989 (95% CI, 0.980–0.999). In contrast, the SVM model had a sensitivity of 84.0% (95% CI, 76.3–89.3%) and a specificity of 87.5% (95% CI, 82.7–91.1%) with an AUC of 0.895 (95% CI, 0.859–0.931). Thus, the DL model outperformed the SVM model in all indices assessed (P