Enhancing AI reliability: A foundation model with uncertainty estimation for optical coherence tomography-based retinal disease diagnosis

Inability to express the confidence level and detect unseen disease classes limits the clinical implementation of artificial intelligence in the real world. We develop a foundation model with uncertainty estimation (FMUE) to detect 16 retinal conditions on optical coherence tomography (OCT). In the internal test set, FMUE achieves a higher F1 score of 95.74% than other state-of-the-art algorithms (92.03%-93.66%) and improves to 97.44% with threshold strategy. The model achieves similar excellent performance on two external test sets from the same and different OCT machines. In human-model comparison, FMUE achieves a higher F1 score of 96.30% than retinal experts (86.95%, p = 0.004), senior doctors (82.71%, p < 0.001), junior doctors (66.55%, p < 0.001), and generative pretrained transformer 4 with vision (GPT-4V) (32.39%, p < 0.001). Besides, FMUE predicts high uncertainty scores for >85% images of non-target-category diseases or with low quality to prompt manual checks and prevent misdiagnosis. Our FMUE provides a trustworthy method for automatic retinal anomaly detection in a clinical open-set environment.