Early detection of glaucoma: feature visualization with a deep convolutional network

Abstract

Computer-aided diagnosis of ocular disorders like glaucoma can be effectively performed with retinal fundus images. Since the advent of machine learning and later deep learning techniques in medical image analysis, research focusing on automated and early detection of glaucoma has gained prominence. In this paper, we show how a deep Convolutional Neural Network model can be used in visualising the features related to Glaucoma that are consistent with (a subset of) those used by ophthalmologists for diagnosis. However, since the doctors do not necessarily depend entirely on these features but back them up with other important measurements such as visual field testing (HVF), any deep neural network such as CNN may not necessarily be expected to yield 100% accuracy. Further, other important parameters such as Intraocular Pressure (IOP), which may be built into a deep learning model, may not necessarily correlate well with the presence of Glaucoma. In this work, a deep CNN model has been trained and tested on a large number of high-quality fundus images, both normal and glaucomatous. We compare the results with transfer learning models such as VGG16, ResNet50, and MobileNetV2. On an average, we obtained an accuracy of 93.75% in identifying glaucoma, focusing only on the features of the fundus image.

Keywords

• Glaucoma
• fundus images
• convolutional neural network
• deep learning
• visualization