Vessel Density Features of Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography for Classification of Glaucoma Using Machine Learning.

PRCIS: Machine learning (ML) based on the optical coherence tomography angiography vessel density features with different thresholds using a support vector machine (SVM) model provides excellent performance for glaucoma detection.

BACKGROUND: To assess the classification performance of ML based on the 4 vessel density features of peripapillary optical coherence tomography angiography for glaucoma detection.

METHODS: Images from 119 eyes of 119 glaucoma patients and 76 eyes of 76 healthy individuals were included. Four vessel density features of optical coherence tomography angiography images were developed using a threshold-based segmentation method and were integrated into 3 models of machine learning classifiers. Images were divided into 70% training set and 30% test set. Classification performances of SVM, random forest, and Gaussian Naive Bayes models were evaluated with the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and accuracy.

RESULTS: Glaucoma eyes had lower vessel densities at different thresholds. For differentiating glaucoma eyes, the best results were achieved with 70% and 100% thresholds, in which SVM classifier discriminated glaucoma from healthy eyes with an AUC of 1 and accuracy of 1. After SVM, the random forest classifier with 100% thresholds showed an AUC of 0.993 and an accuracy of 0.994. Furthermore, the AUC of our ML performance (SVM) was 0.96 in a subgroup analysis of mild and moderate glaucoma eyes.

CONCLUSIONS: ML based on the combined peripapillary vessel density features of total vessels and capillaries in the whole image and ring image could provide excellent performance for glaucoma detection.