Glaucoma detection in retinal fundus images using residual network architecture

Abstract

Glaucoma is a significant eye disease that can lead to irreversible vision loss if not detected and treated early. This research focuses on developing an automated glaucoma detection system using a combination of a convolutional neural network (CNN) with the residual network 18 (ResNet18) architecture, locality sensitive hashing (LSH), and Hamming distance calculation. The CNN model is trained to extract meaningful features from retinal images, while LSH enables efficient indexing and retrieval of similar images. Hamming distance calculations are utilized to measure the dissimilarity between binary codes obtained from LSH. A dataset of 506 retinal images, consisting of 117 glaucoma images, 19 glaucoma suspect images, and 370 healthy images. The proposed glaucoma detection system achieved an average accuracy of 99.96%, sensitivity of 99.97%, and specificity of 99.94% during training, and 82.37% accuracy, 86.78% sensitivity, and 73.55% specificity during testing. Comparative analysis demonstrated its superiority over traditional methods. Further research should focus on larger datasets and explore multi-class classification for different glaucoma stages. The proposed system has potential for early glaucoma detection, facilitating timely intervention, and preventing vision loss.