Automated glaucoma screening method based on image segmentation and feature extraction

Glaucoma is a chronic disease that threatens eye health and can cause permanent blindness. Since there is no cure for glaucoma, early screening and detection are crucial for the prevention of glaucoma. Therefore, a novel method for automatic glaucoma screening that combines clinical measurement features with image-based features is proposed in this paper. To accurately extract clinical measurement features, an improved UNet++ neural network is proposed to segment the optic disc and optic cup based on region of interest (ROI) simultaneously. Some important clinical measurement features, such as optic cup to disc ratio, are extracted from the segmentation results. Then, the increasing field of view (IFOV) feature model is proposed to fully extract texture features, statistical features, and other hidden image-based features. Next, we select the best feature combination from all the features and use the adaptive synthetic sampling approach to alleviate the uneven distribution of training data. Finally, a gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) classifier for glaucoma screening is trained. Experimental results based on the ORIGA dataset show that the proposed algorithm achieves excellent glaucoma screening performance with sensitivity of 0.894, accuracy of 0.843, and AUC of 0.901, which is superior to other existing methods.Graphical abstract Framework of the proposed glaucoma classification method.