Identifying the Key Components in ResNet-50 for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading from Fundus Images: A Systematic Investigation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although deep learning-based diabetic retinopathy (DR) classification methods typically benefit from well-designed architectures of convolutional neural networks, the training setting also has a non-negligible impact on prediction performance. The training setting includes various interdependent components, such as an objective function, a data sampling strategy, and a data augmentation approach. To identify the key components in a standard deep learning framework (ResNet-50) for DR grading, we systematically analyze the impact of several major components. Extensive experiments are conducted on a publicly available dataset EyePACS. We demonstrate that (1) the DR grading framework is sensitive to input resolution, objective function, and composition of data augmentation; (2) using mean square error as the loss function can effectively improve the performance with respect to a task-specific evaluation metric, namely the quadratically weighted Kappa; (3) utilizing eye pairs boosts the performance of DR grading and; (4) using data resampling to address the problem of imbalanced data distribution in EyePACS hurts the performance. Based on these observations and an optimal combination of the investigated components, our framework, without any specialized network design, achieves a state-of-the-art result (0.8631 for Kappa) on the EyePACS test set (a total of 42,670 fundus images) with only image-level labels. We also examine the proposed training practices on other fundus datasets and other network architectures to evaluate their generalizability. Our codes and pre-trained model are available online.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".