Enhancing Ophthalmic Diagnostics: A New Horizon for OCT Retinal Analysis

Ophthalmic diagnostics play a critical role in the early detection and management of various ocular diseases. Among the advanced imaging modalities employed in ophthalmology, Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) has emerged as a cornerstone technology for non-invasive, high-resolution imaging of ocular structures. This paper analyzes the efficiency of three deep learning models such as VGG16, ResNet50, and InceptionV3, in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images. This study compares the efficiency of these deep learning models in classifying four different pathological retinal conditions: Normal Retina (NR), Choroidal NeoVascularization (CNV), Diabetic Macular Edema (DME), and Early Age-Related Macular Degeneration (EAMD). In addition, we have performed two preprocessing operations, image enhancement and data augmentation, to improve the image quality and to over the data imbalance, respectively. We assessed the performance of these deep learning models using a benchmark dataset. After the experiments, we found that the VGG16 outperforms ResNet50 and InceptionV3 by accomplishing an accuracy of 98.7%.