Retina Image Analysis System for Glaucoma Detection

Glaucoma is a disease of the optic nerve that threatens the eyesight of the patients and is one of the leading causes of blindness. Because healing of died retinal nerve fibers is not possible early detection and prevention is essential. Robust, automated mass-screening will help to extend the symptom-free life of affected patients. We devised a novel, automated glaucoma classification system that does not depend on segmentation based measurements. Our purely data-driven approach is applicable in large-scale screening examinations. It applies a standard pattern recognition pipeline with a 2-stage classification. Our system has an 86% success rate on a data set containing a mixture of 200 real images of healthy and glaucomatous eyes. The performance of the system is comparable to human medical experts in detecting glaucomatous retina fundus images.