Glaucoma Assessment from OCT images using Capsule Network

Optical coherence tomographic (OCT) images provide valuable information for understanding the changes occurring in the retina due to glaucoma, specifically, related to the retinal nerve fiber layer and the optic nerve head. In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach using Capsule network for glaucoma classification, which directly operates on 3D OCT volumes. The network is trained only on labelled volumes and does not attempt any region/structure segmentation. The proposed network was assessed on 50 volumes and found to achieve 0.97 for the area under the ROC curve (AUC). This is considerably higher than the existing approaches which are majorly based on machine learning or rely on segmentation of the required structures from OCT. Our network also outperforms 3D convolutional neural networks despite the fewer network parameters and fewer epochs needed for training.