Convex hull based neuro-retinal optic cup ellipse optimization in glaucoma diagnosis

Abstract

Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness. Glaucoma can be diagnosed through measurement of neuro-retinal optic cup-to-disc ratio (CDR). Automatic calculation of optic cup boundary is challenging due to the interweavement of blood vessels with the surrounding tissues around the cup. A Convex Hull based Neuro-Retinal Optic Cup Ellipse Optimization algorithm improves the accuracy of the boundary estimation. The algorithm's effectiveness is demonstrated on 70 clinical patient's data set collected from Singapore Eye Research Institute. The root mean squared error of the new algorithm is 43% better than the ARGALI system which is the state-of-the-art. This further leads to a large clinical evaluation of the algorithm involving 15 thousand patients from Australia and Singapore. ©2009 IEEE.