Detection and Classification of Diabetic Macular Edema with a Desktop-Based Code-Free Machine Learning Tool.

Objectives: To evaluate the effectiveness of the Lobe application, a machine learning (ML) tool that can be used on a personal computer without requiring coding expertise, in the recognition and classification of diabetic macular edema (DME) in spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) scans.

Materials and methods: A total of 695 cross-sectional SD-OCT images from 336 patients with DME and 200 OCT images of 200 healthy controls were included. Images with DME were classified into three main types: diffuse retinal edema (DRE), cystoid macular edema (CME), and cystoid macular degeneration (CMD). To develop the ML model, we used the desktop-based code-free Lobe application, which includes a pre-trained ResNet-50 V2 convolutional neural network and is available free of charge. The performance of the trained model in recognizing and classifying DME was evaluated with 41 DRE, 28 CMD, 70 CME, and 40 normal SD-OCT images that were not used in the training.

Results: The developed model showed 99.28% sensitivity and 100% specificity for class-independent detection of DME. Sensitivity and specificity by labels were 87.80% and 98.57% for DRE, 96.43% and 99.29% for CME, and 95.71% and 95.41% for CMD, respectively.

Conclusion: To our knowledge, this is the first evaluation of the effectiveness of Lobe with ophthalmological images, and the results indicate that it can be used with high efficiency in the recognition and classification of DME from SD-OCT images by ophthalmologists without coding expertise.