Glaucoma Detection: Joint Segmentation and Classification Framework via Deep Ensemble Network

Clinical research shows that glaucoma is primarily caused by pathological changes in the optic nerve structure, which may bring about irreversible damage of sight. In relevant literature research, the cup-to-disc ratio (CDR) is mainly used as an important indicator for glaucoma detection, which needs to segment optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) region clearly and accurately. However, due to the low contrast image of boundary, the segmentation of OD and OC is still a challenging problem. In this paper, a novel hybrid model based on the ensemble random-forest deep-neural-network (RF-DNN) is proposed for OD and OC segmentation, which can calculate more accurately for glaucoma detection. At the same time, the advantages of DNN and ensemble RF are combined to carry out the corresponding feature extraction and classification, which employs the winner-takes-all strategically to the segmentation and classification for glaucoma detection. Finally, the experiment result shows that the proposed method has reached the best evaluation level in terms of OD and OC segmentation results on ORIGA dataset and SCES dataset, which achieves highest diagnosis accuracy with AUC of 0.96 and 0.98 on ORIGA dataset and SCES dataset, respectively.