Texture Attention Network for Diabetic Retinopathy Classification

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a disease caused by a high level of glucose in retina vessels. This malicious disease put millions of people around the world at risk for vision loss each year. Being a life-threatening disease, early diagnosis can be an effective step in the treatment and prevention of vision loss. To automate the early diagnosis process, computer-aided diagnosis methods are not only useful in detecting the diabetic signatures but also provide information regarding the diabetic grade for the optometrist to determine an appropriate treatment. Several deep classification models are proposed in the literature to solve the diabetic retinopathy classification task, however, these methods usually lack incorporate an attention mechanism to better encode the semantic dependency and highlight the most important region for boosting the model performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose to incorporate a style and content recalibration mechanism inside the deep neural network to adaptively scale the informative regions for diabetic retinopathy classification. In our proposed method, the input image passes through the encoder module to encode both high-level and semantic features. Next, by utilizing a content and style separation mechanism, we decompose the representational space into a style (e.g., texture features) and content (e.g., semantic and contextual features) representation. The texture attention module takes the style representation and applies a high-pass filter to highlight the texture information while the spatial normalization module uses a convolutional operation to determine the more informative region inside the retinopathy image to detect diabetic signs. Once the attention modules are applied to the representational features, the fusion module combines both features to form a normalized representation for the decoding path. The decoder module in our model performs both diabetic grading and healthy, non-healthy classification tasks. Our experiment on APTOS Kaggle dataset (accuracy 0.85) demonstrates a significant improvement compared to the literature work. This fact reveals the applicability of our method in a real-world scenario.