DC-Gnet for detection of glaucoma in retinal fundus imaging

Abstract

Glaucoma is a retinal disease caused due to increased intraocular pressure in the eyes. It is the second most dominant cause of irreversible blindness after cataract, and if this remains undiagnosed, it may become the first common cause. Ophthalmologists use different comprehensive retinal examinations such as ophthalmoscopy, tonometry, perimetry, gonioscopy and pachymetry to diagnose glaucoma. But all these approaches are manual and time-consuming. Thus, a computer-aided diagnosis system may aid as an assistive measure for the initial screening of glaucoma for diagnosis purposes, thereby reducing the computational complexity. This paper presents a deep learning-based disc cup segmentation glaucoma network (DC-Gnet) for the extraction of structural features namely cup-to-disc ratio, disc damage likelihood scale and inferior superior nasal temporal regions for diagnosis of glaucoma. The proposed approach of segmentation has been tested on RIM-One and Drishti-GS dataset. Further, based on experimental analysis, the DC-Gnet is found to outperform U-net, Gnet and Deep-lab architectures.