Supervised Contrastive Learning with Angular Margin for the Detection and Grading of Diabetic Retinopathy

Many researchers have realized the intelligent medical diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy (DR) from fundus images by using deep learning methods, including supervised contrastive learning (SupCon). However, although SupCon brings label information into the calculation of contrastive learning, it does not distinguish between augmented positives and same-label positives. As a result, we propose the concept of Angular Margin and incorporate it into SupCon to address this issue. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy, we tested it on two datasets for the detection and grading of DR. To align with previous work, Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F1, and AUC were selected as evaluation metrics. Moreover, we also chose alignment and uniformity to verify the effect of representation learning and UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) to visualize fundus image embeddings. In summary, DR detection achieved state-of-the-art results across all metrics, with Accuracy = 98.91, Precision = 98.93, Recall = 98.90, F1 = 98.91, and AUC = 99.80. The grading also attained state-of-the-art results in terms of Accuracy and AUC, which were 85.61 and 93.97, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that Angular Margin is an excellent intelligent medical diagnostic algorithm, performing well in both DR detection and grading tasks.