A Fast and Accurate Method for Glaucoma Screening from Smartphone-Captured Fundus Images

The glaucoma is an eye disease that causes blindness when it progresses in an advanced stage. Early glaucoma diagnosis is essential to prevent the vision loss. However, early detection is not covered due to the lack of ophthalmologists and the limited accessibility to retinal image capture devices. In this paper, we present an automated method for glaucoma screening dedicated for Smartphone Captured Fundus Images (SCFIs). The implementation of the method into a smartphone associated to an optical lens for retina capturing leads to a mobile aided screening system for glaucoma. The challenge consists in insuring higher performance detection despite the moderate quality of SCFIs, with a reduced execution time to be adequate for the clinical use. The main idea consists in deducing glaucoma based on the vessel displacement inside the Optic Disk (OD), where the vessel tree remains sufficiently modeled on SCFIs. Within this objective, our major contribution consists in proposing: (1) a robust processing for locating vessel centroids in order to adequately model the vessel distribution, and (2) a feature vector that relevantly reflect two main glaucoma biomarkers in terms of vessel displacement. Furthermore, all processing steps are carefully chosen based on lower complexity, to be suitable for fast clinical screening. A first evaluation of our method is performed using the two public DRISHTI-DB and DRIONS-DB databases, where 99% and 95% accuracy, 96.77% and 97,5% specificity and 100% and 95% sensitivity are respectively achieved. Thereafter, the method is evaluated using two fundus image databases respectively captured through a smartphone and retinograph for the same persons. We achieve 100% accuracy using both databases which assesses the robustness of our method. In addition, the detection is performed on 0.027 and 0.029 second when executed respectively on the Samsung-M51 on the Samsung-A70 smartphone devices. Our proposed smartphone app provides a cost-effective and widely accessible mobile platform for early screening of glaucoma in remote clinics or areas with limited access to fundus cameras and ophthalmologists. (C) 2021 AGBM. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This study presents an automated method for glaucoma screening using smartphone captured fundus images. By analyzing the vessel displacement inside the optic disk, glaucoma can be inferred. The method achieves high accuracy and robustness, making it a cost-effective and widely accessible platform for early screening of glaucoma.