Automatic 3D change detection for glaucoma diagnosis

Abstract

Important diagnostic criteria for glaucoma are changes in the 3D structure of the optic disc due to optic nerve damage. We propose an automatic approach for detecting these changes in 3D models reconstructed from fundus images of the same patient taken at different times. For each time session, only two uncalibated fundus images are required. The approach applies a 6-point algorithm to estimate relative camera pose assuming a constant camera focal length. To deal with the instability of 3D reconstruction associated with fundus images, our approach keeps multiple candidate reconstruction solutions for each image pair. The best 3D reconstruction is found by optimizing the 3D registration of all images after an iterative bundle adjustment that tolerates possible structure changes. The 3D structure changes are detected by evaluating the reprojection errors of feature points in image space. We validate the approach by comparing the diagnosis results with manual grading by human experts on a fundus image dataset.