Atlas-based score for automatic glaucoma risk stratification

Glaucoma is a disease that affects the optic nerve and can lead to blindness. The cup-to-disc ratio (CDR) measurement is one of the key clinical indicators for glaucoma assessment. However, the CDR only evaluates the relative sizes of the cup and optic disc (OD) via their diameters, and does not characterize local morphological changes that can inform clinicians on early signs of glaucoma. In this work, we propose a novel glaucoma score based on a statistical atlas framework that automatically quantifies the deformations of the OD region induced by glaucoma. A deep-learning approach is first used to segment the optic cup with a dedicated atlas-based data augmentation strategy. The segmented OD region (disc, cup and vessels) is then registered to the statistical OD atlas and the deformation is projected onto the atlas eigenvectors. The atlas glaucoma score (AGS) is then obtained by a linear combination of the principal modes of deformation of the atlas with linear discriminant analysis. The AGS performs better than the CDR on the three datasets used for evaluation, including RIM-ONE and ORIGA650. Compared to the CDR measurement, which yields an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 91.4% using the expert segmentations, the AGS achieves an AUC of 98.2%. Our novel glaucoma score captures more complex deformations within the optic disc region than the CDR can. Such morphological changes are the first cue of glaucoma onset, before the visual field is affected. The proposed approach can thus significantly improve early detection of glaucoma.