A Comparison of Deep Learning Techniques for Glaucoma Diagnosis on Retinal Fundus Images

Glaucoma is one of the serious disorders which cause permanent vision loss if it left undetected. The primary cause of the disease is elevated intraocular pressure, impacting the optic nerve head (ONH) that originates from the optic disc. The variation in optic disc to optic cup ratio helps in early detection of the disease. Manual calculation of Cup to Disc Ratio (CDR) consumes more time and the prediction is also not accurate. Utilizing deep learning for the automatic detection of glaucoma facilitates precise and early identification, significantly enhancing the accuracy of glaucoma detection. The deep learning technique initiates the process by initially pre-processing the image to achieve data augmentation, followed by the segmentation of the optic disc and optic cup from the retinal fundus image. From the segmented Optic Disc (OD)and Optic Cup (OC) feature are selected and CDR calculated. Based on the CDR value the Glaucoma classification is performed. Various deep learning techniques like CNN, transfer learning, algorithm was proposed in early detection of glaucoma. From the comparative analysis glaucoma diagnosis, the proposed deep learning artifact Convolutional Neural Network outperform in early diagnosis of glaucoma providing accuracy of 99.3 8%

Machine Learning Techniques, Detection and Prediction of Glaucoma– A Systematic Review

Globally, glaucoma is the most common factor in both permanent blindness and impairment. However, the majority of patients are unaware they have the condition, and clinical practise continues to face difficulties in detecting glaucoma progression using current technology. An expert ophthalmologist examines the retinal portion of the eye to see how the glaucoma is progressing. This method is quite time-consuming, and doing it manually takes more time. Therefore, using deep learning and machine learning techniques, this problem can be resolved by automatically diagnosing glaucoma. This systematic review involved a comprehensive analysis of various automated glaucoma prediction and detection techniques. More than 100 articles on Machine learning (ML) techniques with understandable graph and tabular column are reviewed considering summery, method, objective, performance, advantages and disadvantages. In the ML techniques such as support vector machine (SVM), and K-means. Fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm are widely used in glaucoma detection and prediction. Through the systematic review, the most accurate technique to detect and predict glaucoma can be determined which can be utilized for future betterment

A Polar Map Based Approach Using Retinal Fundus Images for Glaucoma Detection

Cup-to-disc ratio is commonly used as an important parameter for glaucoma screening, involving segmentation of the optic cup on fundus images. We propose a novel polar map representation of the optic disc, using a combination of supervised and unsupervised cup segmentation techniques, for detection of glaucoma. Instead of performing hard thresholding on the segmentation output to extract the cup, we consider the cup confidence scores inside the disc to construct a polar map, and extract sector-wise features for learning a glaucoma risk probability (GRP) for the image. We compare the performance of GRP vis-à-vis the cup-to-disc ratio (CDR). On an evaluation dataset of 100 images from the publicly available RIM-ONE database, our method achieves 82% sensitivity at 84% specificity, and 96% sensitivity at 60% specificity (AUC of 0.8964). Experiments indicate that the polar map based method can provide a more discriminatory glaucoma risk probability score compared to CDR

Eye Disease Detection Using Computer Vision

Glaucoma and Diabetic Retinopathy(DR) are among the leading causes of blindness. Belated handling of Cataract can impact the vision causing blindness. Often the scarcity of experts can lead to delayed diagnosis, resulting in untreatable conditions. But detection of these diseases at earliest stage and treatment can aid patient in avoiding vision loss. An automatic disease detection system can help this by providing accurate and early diagnosis. In proposed system, diagnosis will be obtained using image processing and mining techniques on fundus image. Feature extraction using DCT. K-NN classification algorithm will be used to classify the image in a specific class (Normal,Glaucoma,DR or Cataract)

Machine Learning Approaches for Automated Glaucoma Detection using Clinical Data and Optical Coherence Tomography Images

Glaucoma is a multi-factorial, progressive blinding optic-neuropathy. A variety of factors, including genetics, vasculature, anatomy, and immune factors, are involved. Worldwide more than 80 million people are affected by glaucoma, and around 300,000 in Australia, where 50% remain undiagnosed. Untreated glaucoma can lead to blindness. Early detection by Artificial intelligence (AI) is crucial to accelerate the diagnosis process and can prevent further vision loss. Many proposed AI systems have shown promising performance for automated glaucoma detection using two-dimensional (2D) data. However, only a few studies had optimistic outcomes for glaucoma detection and staging. Moreover, the automated AI system still faces challenges in diagnosing at the clinicians’ level due to the lack of interpretability of the ML algorithms and integration of multiple clinical data. AI technology would be welcomed by doctors and patients if the "black box" notion is overcome by developing an explainable, transparent AI system with similar pathological markers used by clinicians as the sign of early detection and progression of glaucomatous damage. Therefore, the thesis aimed to develop a comprehensive AI model to detect and stage glaucoma by incorporating a variety of clinical data and utilising advanced data analysis and machine learning (ML) techniques. The research first focuses on optimising glaucoma diagnostic features by combining structural, functional, demographic, risk factor, and optical coherence tomography (OCT) features. The significant features were evaluated using statistical analysis and trained in ML algorithms to observe the detection performance. Three crucial structural ONH OCT features: cross-sectional 2D radial B-scan, 3D vascular angiography and temporal-superior-nasal-inferior-temporal (TSNIT) B-scan, were analysed and trained in explainable deep learning (DL) models for automated glaucoma prediction. The explanation behind the decision making of DL models were successfully demonstrated using the feature visualisation. The structural features or distinguished affected regions of TSNIT OCT scans were precisely localised for glaucoma patients. This is consistent with the concept of explainable DL, which refers to the idea of making the decision-making processes of DL models transparent and interpretable to humans. However, artifacts and speckle noise often result in misinterpretation of the TSNIT OCT scans. This research also developed an automated DL model to remove the artifacts and noise from the OCT scans, facilitating error-free retinal layers segmentation, accurate tissue thickness estimation and image interpretation. Moreover, to monitor and grade glaucoma severity, the visual field (VF) test is commonly followed by clinicians for treatment and management. Therefore, this research uses the functional features extracted from VF images to train ML algorithms for staging glaucoma from early to advanced/severe stages. Finally, the selected significant features were used to design and develop a comprehensive AI model to detect and grade glaucoma stages based on the data quantity and availability. In the first stage, a DL model was trained with TSNIT OCT scans, and its output was combined with significant structural and functional features and trained in ML models. The best-performed ML model achieved an area under the curve (AUC): 0.98, an accuracy of 97.2%, a sensitivity of 97.9%, and a specificity of 96.4% for detecting glaucoma. The model achieved an overall accuracy of 90.7% and an F1 score of 84.0% for classifying normal, early, moderate, and advanced-stage glaucoma. In conclusion, this thesis developed and proposed a comprehensive, evidence-based AI model that will solve the screening problem for large populations and relieve experts from manually analysing a slew of patient data and associated misinterpretation problems. Moreover, this thesis demonstrated three structural OCT features that could be added as excellent diagnostic markers for precise glaucoma diagnosis

A Depth Based Approach to Glaucoma Detection Using Retinal Fundus Images

Qualitative evaluation of stereo retinal fundus images by experts is a widely accepted method for optic nerve head evaluation (ONH) in glaucoma. The quantitative evaluation using stereo involves depth estimation of the ONH and thresholding of depth to extract optic cup. In this paper, we attempt the reverse, by estimating the disc depth using supervised and unsupervised techniques on a single optic disc image. Our depth estimation approach is evaluated on the INSPIRE-stereo dataset by using single images from the stereo pairs, and is compared with the OCT based depth ground truths. We extract spatial and intensity features from the depth maps, and perform classification of images into glaucomatous and normal. Our approach is evaluated on a dataset of 100 images and achieves an AUC of 0.888 with a sensitivity of 83% at specificity 83%. Experiments indicate that our approach can reliably estimate depth, and provide valuable information for glaucoma detection and for monitoring its progression