Signal‐to‐noise ratios for measuring saliency of features extracted by eigenvector methods from ophthalmic arterial Doppler signals

Abstract: Features are used to represent patterns with minimal loss of important information. The feature vector, which is composed of the set of all features used to describe a pattern, is a reduced‐dimensional representation of that pattern. Medical diagnostic accuracies can be improved when the pattern is simplified through representation by important features. By identifying a set of salient features, the noise in a classification model can be reduced, resulting in more accurate classification. In this study, a signal‐to‐noise ratio saliency measure was employed to determine the saliency of input features of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) used in classification of ophthalmic arterial Doppler signals. Eigenvector methods were used to extract features representing the ophthalmic arterial Doppler signals. The RNNs used in the ophthalmic arterial Doppler signal classification were trained for the signal‐to‐noise ratio screening method. The application results of the signal‐to‐noise ratio screening method to the ophthalmic arterial Doppler signals demonstrated that classification accuracies of RNNs with salient input features are higher than those of RNNs with salient and non‐salient input features.