Glauconet: A highly robust stacked auto-encoder assisted deep learning model for glaucoma detection system

Abstract

High pace rise in Glaucoma, an irreversible eye disease that deteriorates vision capacity of human has alarmed academia-industries to develop a novel and robust Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system for early Glaucomatic eye detection. The main root cause for glaucoma growth depends on its structural alterations in the retina and is very much essential for ophthalmologists to identify it at an initial period to stop its progression. Fundoscopy is among one of the biomedical imaging techniques to analyze the internal structure of retina. Recently, numerous efforts have been made to exploit Spatial-Temporal features including morphological values of Optical Disk (OD), Optical Cup (OC), Neuro-Retinal Rim (NRR) etc to perform Glaucoma detection in fundus images. Here, some issues like: suitable pre-processing, precise Region of Interest segmentation, post-segmentation and lack of generalized threshold limits efficacy of the major existing approaches. Furthermore, the optimal segmentation of OD and OC, nerves removal from OD or OC is often tedious and demands more efficient solution. However, these approaches cumulatively turn out to be computationally complex and time-consuming. As potential alternative, deep learning techniques have gained widespread attention, especially for image analysis or vision technologies. With this motive, in this paper, the authors proposed a novel Convolutional Stacked Auto-Encoder (CSAE) assisted Deep Learning Model for Glaucoma Detection and Classification model named GlaucoNet. Unlike classical methods, GlaucoNet applies Stacked Auto-Encoder by using hierarchical CNN structure to perform deep feature extraction and learning. By adapting complex data nature, and large features, GlaucoNet was designed with three layers: convolutional layer (CONV), Max-pool layer (MP) and two Fully Connected (FC) layers where the first performs feature extraction and learning, while second exhibits feature selection followed by the reduction of spatial resolution of the individual feature map to avoid large number of parameters and computational complexities. To avoid saturation problem in this work, by marking an applied dropout as 0.5. MATLAB based simulation-results with DRISHTI-GS and DRION-DB datasets affirmed that the proposed GlaucoNet model outperforms as compared to other state-of-art techniques: neural network based approaches in terms of accuracy, recall, precision, F-Measure and balanced accuracy. The overall parametric measured values shown better performance for GlaucoNet model.