Enhanced Optic Disk and Cup Segmentation with Glaucoma Screening from Fundus Images using Position encoded CNNs

Abstract: In this manuscript, we present a robust method for glaucoma screening from fundus images using an ensemble of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The pipeline comprises of first segmenting the optic disk and optic cup from the fundus image, then extracting a patch centered around the optic disk and subsequently feeding to the classification network to differentiate the image as diseased or healthy. In the segmentation network, apart from the image, we make use of spatial co-ordinate (X & Y) space so as to learn the structure of interest better. The classification network is composed of a DenseNet201 and a ResNet18 which were pre-trained on a large cohort of natural images. On the REFUGE validation data (n=400), the segmentation network achieved a dice score of 0.88 and 0.64 for optic disc and optic cup respectively. For the tasking differentiating images affected with glaucoma from healthy images, the area under the ROC curve was observed to be 0.85.