Glaucoma is an incurable eye disease that leads to slow progressive degeneration of the retina. It cannot be fully cured, however, its progression can be controlled in case of early diagnosis. Unfortunately, due to the absence of clear symptoms during the early stages, early diagnosis are rare. Glaucoma must be detected at early stages since late diagnosis can lead to permanent vision loss. Glaucoma affects the retina by damaging the Optic Nerve Head (ONH). Its diagnosis is dependent on the measurements of Optic Cup (OC) and Optic Disc (OD) in the retina. Computer vision techniques have been shown to diagnose glaucoma effectively and correctly with little overhead. These techniques measure OC and OC dimensions using machine learning based classification and segmentation algorithms. This article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of various existing techniques that use machine learning to detect and diagnose glaucoma based on fundus images. Readers would be able to understand the challenges glaucoma presents from an image processing and machine learning stand-point and will be able to identify gaps in current research.
8 November 2023 in IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
In this study, we propose LDMRes-Net, a lightweight dual-multiscale residual block-based convolutional neural network tailored for medical image segmentation on IoT and edge platforms. Conventional U-Net-based models face challenges in meeting the speed and efficiency demands of real-time clinical applications, such as disease monitoring, radiation therapy, and image-guided surgery. In this study, we present the Lightweight Dual Multiscale Residual Block-based Convolutional Neural Network (LDMRes-Net), which is specifically designed to overcome these difficulties. LDMRes-Net overcomes these limitations with its remarkably low number of learnable parameters (0.072M), making it highly suitable for resource-constrained devices. The model's key innovation lies in its dual multiscale residual block architecture, which enables the extraction of refined features on multiple scales, enhancing overall segmentation performance. To further optimize efficiency, the number of filters is carefully selected to prevent overlap, reduce training time, and improve computational efficiency. The study includes comprehensive evaluations, focusing on the segmentation of the retinal image of vessels and hard exudates crucial for the diagnosis and treatment of ophthalmology. The results demonstrate the robustness, generalizability, and high segmentation accuracy of LDMRes-Net, positioning it as an efficient tool for accurate and rapid medical image segmentation in diverse clinical applications, particularly on IoT and edge platforms. Such advances hold significant promise for improving healthcare outcomes and enabling real-time medical image analysis in resource-limited settings.
In recent years, convolutional neural network architectures have become increasingly complex to achieve improved performance on well-known benchmark datasets. In this research, we have introduced G-Net light, a lightweight modified GoogleNet with improved filter count per layer to reduce feature overlaps, hence reducing the complexity. Additionally, by limiting the amount of pooling layers in the proposed architecture, we have exploited the skip connections to minimize the spatial information loss. The suggested architecture is analysed using three publicly available datasets for retinal vessel segmentation, namely DRIVE, CHASE and STARE datasets. The proposed G-Net light achieves an average accuracy of 0.9686, 0.9726, 0.9730 and - of 0.8202, 0.8048, 0.8178 on DRIVE, CHASE, and STARE datasets, respectively. The proposed G-Net light achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms other lightweight vessel segmentation architectures with fewer trainable number of parameters.