An Approach for Glaucoma Detection Based on the Features Representation in Radon Domain

Abstract

Glaucoma is a chronic and irreversible eye disease that leads to the structural changes of the Optic Nerve Head (ONH). In clinical practice, ONH assessment is one of the most significant measurements for glaucoma detection. However, the structural changes of ONH reveals complex mixture of visual patterns that are challenging to be represented. In this paper, a novel features representation approach in Radon domain is proposed to capture these complex patterns. In our method, fundus images are projected into Radon domain with Radon Transform (RT) in which the spatial radial variations of ONH are converted to a discrete signal for constraint optimization, feature enhancement and dimensionality reduction. Subsequently, the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is adopted to obtain subtle differences and quantize them. The experiments show that our approach achieves excellent detection results on RIMONE-r2 dataset with the accuracy and Area Under the Curve (AUC) of receiver operating characteristic curve at 86.154% and 0.906 respectively, much better than other algorithms. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can be used as an effective tool for glaucoma detection in the mass screening of fundus images.