Progressive Deep Transfer Learning for Accurate Glaucoma Detection in Medical Imaging

Glaucoma leads to permanent vision disability by damaging the optic nerve, which transmits visual images to the brain. The fact that glaucoma doesn't exhibit any symptoms as it progresses and can't be halted in later stages makes early diagnosis critical. Although various deep learning models have been applied to detect glaucoma from digital fundus images, the scarcity of labeled data has limited their generalization performance, along with their high computational complexity and specialized hardware requirements. In this study, a progressive transfer learning with preprocessing techniques is proposed for the early detection of glaucoma in fundus images. The performance of this approach is compared against transfer learning and convolutional neural networks using three benchmark datasets: Cataract, Glaucoma and Origa. The experimental results demonstrate that reusing pre-trained models from ImageNet and applying them to a database containing the same disease leads to improved performance, compared to using databases with different diseases in progressive transfer learning. Additionally, applying preprocessing techniques to the databases further enhances the results.