Estimating Glaucomatous Visual Sensitivity from Retinal Thickness by Using Pattern-Based Regularizat

Hiroki Sugiura (The University of Tokyo); Taichi Kiwaki (The University of Tokyo); Siamak Yousefi (University of Tennessee); Hiroshi Murata (The University of Tokyo); Ryo Asaoka (The University of Tokyo); Kenji Yamanishi (The University of Tokyo)

Conventionally, glaucoma is diagnosed on the basis of visual field sensitivity (VF). However, the VF test is time-consuming, costly, and noisy. Using retinal thickness (RT) for glaucoma diagnosis is currently desirable. Thus, we propose a new methodology for estimating VF from RT in glaucomatous eyes. The key ideas are to use our new methods of pattern-based regularization (PBR) and pattern-based visualization (PBV) with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). PBR effectively conducts supervised learning of RT-VF relations in combination with unsupervised learning from non-paired VF data. We can thereby avoid overfitting of a CNN to small sized data. PBV visualizes functional correspondence between RT and VF with its nonlinearity preserved. We empirically demonstrate with real datasets that a CNN with PBR achieves the highest estimation accuracy to date and that a CNN with PBV is effective for knowledge discovery in an ophthalmological context.

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