Deep Learning based Framework for Automatic Diagnosis of Glaucoma based on analysis of Focal Notching in the Optic Nerve Head
This work addresses early detection of glaucoma, a progressive eye disease, but is incremental as it combines existing methods like deep learning segmentation and SVM classification with focal notch analysis.
The paper tackled automatic glaucoma diagnosis by developing a deep learning pipeline for segmenting optic disc and cup regions from fundus images, achieving 93.33% accuracy on the DRISHTI-GS dataset.
Automatic evaluation of the retinal fundus image is emerging as one of the most important tools for early detection and treatment of progressive eye diseases like Glaucoma. Glaucoma results to a progressive degeneration of vision and is characterized by the deformation of the shape of optic cup and the degeneration of the blood vessels resulting in the formation of a notch along the neuroretinal rim. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based pipeline for automatic segmentation of optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) regions from Digital Fundus Images (DFIs), thereby extracting distinct features necessary for prediction of Glaucoma. This methodology has utilized focal notch analysis of neuroretinal rim along with cup-to-disc ratio values as classifying parameters to enhance the accuracy of Computer-aided design (CAD) systems in analyzing glaucoma. Support Vector-based Machine Learning algorithm is used for classification, which classifies DFIs as Glaucomatous or Normal based on the extracted features. The proposed pipeline was evaluated on the freely available DRISHTI-GS dataset with a resultant accuracy of 93.33% for detecting Glaucoma from DFIs.