Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 67 (2021) 102559

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Biomedical Signal Processing and Control

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/bspc

ECNet: An evolutionary convolutional network for automated glaucoma

detection using fundus images
Deepak Ranjan Nayak a, *, Dibyasundar Das b, Banshidhar Majhi b, Sulatha V. Bhandary c,
U. Rajendra Acharya d, e, f
a
Department of Computer Engineering, Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, India
b
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, India
c
Department of Ophthalmology, Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, India
d
Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore, Singapore
e
Department of Bioinformatics and Medical Engineering, Asia University, Taichung, Taiwan
f
International Research Organization for Advanced Science and Technology (IROAST) Kumamoto University, Kumamoto, Japan

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Glaucoma is an ocular disorder that affects the optic nerve and ultimately leads to partial or complete vision loss.
Glaucoma Hence, there is a strong need for early screening of glaucoma. Earlier diagnosis schemes mostly rely on hand­
Convolution crafted feature engineering. On the other hand, the non-handcrafted feature extraction methods are generally
Non-handcrafted feature
designed with the support of gradient-based algorithms that suffer from critical problems like overfitting and
RCGA
ECNet
demand for a larger set of samples for effective training. To mitigate these issues, in this paper, we propose a
novel non-handcrafted feature extraction method termed as evolutionary convolutional network (ECNet) for
automated detection of glaucoma from fundus images. The proposed method includes various layers such as
convolutional, compression, rectified linear unit (ReLU), and summation layer which facilitate the extraction of
discriminative features. An evolutionary algorithm called real-coded genetic algorithm (RCGA) is employed to
optimize the weights at different layers. The ECNet is trained using a criteria that maximizes the inter-class
distance and minimizes the intra-class variance of different classes. The final feature vectors are then sub­
jected to a set of classifiers such as K-nearest neighbor (KNN), backpropagation neural network (BPNN), support
vector machine (SVM), extreme learning machine (ELM), and kernel ELM (K-ELM) to select optimum performing
model. The experimental results on a dataset of 1426 fundus images (589 normal and 837 glaucoma) demon­
strate that the ECNet model with SVM yielded the highest accuracy of 97.20% compared to state-of-the-art
techniques. The proposed model can aid ophthalmologists to validate their screening.

1. Introduction
Glaucoma is one of the most rapidly growing eye diseases across the
globe that causes irreversible vision loss. It is caused due to the elevated
intraocular pressure which damages the optic nerve (disc). Hence, the
major clinical prodromes appear in the optic disc region [1–4]. Based on
the estimation, it is observed that around 64.3 million individuals aged
40–80 years were diagnosed with glaucoma in 2013 across the globe and
is expected to affect around 112 million people by 2040 [5,6]. Early
detection is thus very imperative that can reduce the progress rate and
avert the vision loss.
In practice, three tests such as optic nerve head (ONH) evaluation,
intraocular pressure (IOP) measurement, and function-based visual field
test are carried out to detect glaucoma clinically [1]. Among them, ONH
evaluation has been found to be most suitable and widely used by the
glaucoma experts [7,8]. This evaluation is usually done manually with
the help of fundus images and the procedure is tedious, time-consuming
and required skilled supervision. Therefore, the design of automated
glaucoma diagnosis systems has recently attracted notable attention to
obtain faster and reliable decision.
The vertical cup to disc ratio (CDR) is a widely accepted clinical
parameter that is used for ONH assessment. The CDR value of a

* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: drnayak@ieee.org (D.R. Nayak), dibyasundar@ieee.org (D. Das), bmajhi@nitrkl.ac.in (B. Majhi), sulatha.bhandary@manipal.edu
(S.V. Bhandary), aru@np.edu.sg (U.R. Acharya).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bspc.2021.102559
Received 31 May 2020; Received in revised form 11 February 2021; Accepted 6 March 2021
Available online 16 March 2021
1746-8094/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
D.R. Nayak et al. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 67 (2021) 102559

glaucoma patient is relatively larger than the normal one. The example strongly relies on the number of training samples used and they tend to
fundus images of both categories and the location of the optic disc and perform poorly with limited training samples. Further, these methods
cup region for one sample (green dotted circle) are depicted in Fig. 1. consider the classification error to tune the parameters. It is worth
Over the past decades, plenty of segmentation methods based on CDR mentioning that these models may not always generate the best feature
are proposed for glaucoma screening [9–11]. These CDR based methods descriptors since their training stops after reaching a high threshold
bypass other parameters and depend strongly on the segmentation ac­ value. Such performance on the training set does not guarantee better
curacy, but suffer from low sensitivity problems. Later, many performance on unknown clinical data. The development of
multi-stage pipeline based machine learning models are proposed with non-handcrafted feature extraction models which can evaluate the
the use of various handcrafted features such as retinal nerve fiber layer quality of features derived is thus needed. A review of notable glaucoma
thickness parameters [12], texture and higher-order spectra (HOS) detection methods along with their performance is reported in Table 1.
features [13,14], wavelet energy features [15], fast Fourier transform, This paper proposes a novel non-handcrafted feature extraction
spline interpolation and principal component analysis (PCA) based
features [16], Radon transform (RT) based features [17], Gabor trans­ Table 1
form and entropy features [18], empirical wavelet transform (EWT) and Summary of existing automated glaucoma detection methods.
correntropy [19], morphological features [20,21], variational mode
Reference Method Classifier No. of Accuracy
decomposition (VMD), fractal dimension (FD) and entropy features images (%)
[22], texton and local configuration pattern (LCP) features [23],
[13] HOS and texture features Random 60 91.00
concatenated wavelet and EWT features [24], RT and modified census
forest
transformation (MCT) based spatial envelope features [25], clinical and [15] DWT and energy features SMO 60 93.33
multiresolution features [26], quasi-bivariate VMD based texture fea­ [20] Morphological features SVM 67 94.11
tures [27], and local binary patterns (LBP) [28]. The classifiers used [18] Gabor transform and SVM 510 93.10
entropy features
commonly in these models include random forest, support vector ma­
[19] EWT and correntropy LS-SVM 505 96.67
chine (SVM), least squares SVM (LS-SVM), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), features
feedforward neural network (FNN) and Naive Bayes. The choice of [22] VMD, FD and entropy LS-SVM 488 94.79
suitable feature descriptor as well as the classification model is a major features
concern with these types of approaches. Further, many of these models [23] Texton and LCP features KNN 702 95.70
[26] Clinical and MLP 86 97.67
have been validated using a less number of samples.
multiresolution features
Due to its advantages over handcrafted feature learning, the non- [25] RT and MCT spatial SVM 1000 97.00
handcrafted feature learning models have gained increasing popularity envelope features
in recent years [29–32]. Limited works have been reported to date using [24] Concatenated DWT and SVM 505 83.57
these methods for screening glaucoma due to the limited availability of EWT features
[27] Quasi-bivariate VMD and LS-SVM 505 86.13
labeled images. For instance, in [2], and [4,33–35] and [36], convolu­ texture features
tional neural network (CNN) based methods are applied to fundus im­ [33] Deep CNN – 650 –
ages to detect glaucoma, whereas, a sparse autoencoder based method is [4] AlexNet SVM 650 –
presented in [37]. However, these methods used gradient-based algo­ [2] CNN – 1426 95.60
[37] Sparse autoencoder 1426 95.30
rithms to tune the model parameters. Their generalization performance
–

Fig. 1. Example of normal and glaucoma fundus images.

2
D.R. Nayak et al.
model which is designed by combining various feature representation
layers and an evolutionary algorithm. The major contributions of the
proposed work are as follows.
• In an automated system, the design of non-handcrafted features with
fewer parameters is preferred to ensure better generalization. A hi­
erarchical feature learning method with a combination of convolu­
tional, ReLU, compression, and summation layers is proposed. The
suggested method demands fewer parameters compared to tradi­
tional non-handcrafted approaches.
• To tune the parameters at different learnable layers, gradient-based
algorithms have been commonly used which have limitations of
demanding a large set of samples, trapping at local optima, and
thereby resulting in poor generalization performance. To mitigate
such issues, the proposed model makes use of a meta-heuristic
optimization algorithm, namely real-coded genetic algorithm
(RCGA) and adopts a strategy based on maximizing the inter-class
distance and minimizing intra-class variability to extract high level
features from the images directly.
• The effectiveness of the proposed model is evaluated on a dataset
containing 1426 retinal fundus images. Further, the existing models
based on both machine learning and deep learning have been vali­
dated using the same dataset and the results are compared.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. The detail
description of the model is presented in Section 2. Section 3 presents the
dataset used, experimental settings, results and observation. Eventually,
the concluding remarks of this work are drawn in Section 4.
2. Proposed methodology
The design of optimal features using retinal fundus images is still a
difficult task due to large variability in the images. The performance of
an automated system strongly relies on the kind of features used. Many
handcrafted features and limited non-handcrafted features have been
applied to detect glaucoma [3]. In non-handcrafted feature extraction
schemes, the gradient descent algorithm has been extensively harnessed
as the parameter tuning strategy to learn features through error opti­
mization. However, learning optimal features with fewer samples is no
longer attainable using these algorithms. Therefore, we proposed a
feature extraction technique that uses a meta-heuristic approach to tune
the learnable parameters. The proposed model includes two phases:
feature learning and classification. In the first phase, it focuses on
learning important features directly from the training images, while in
the second phase, these features are fed to various classifiers separately
to classify the unknown samples. The overall classification model is
depicted in Fig. 2.
The feature learning model includes various layers namely, a con­
volutional layer, ReLU layer, compression layer, summation layer, and
sigmoid layer.
Convolutional layer: This layer is one of the vital layers of our
Fig. 2. Overall block diagram of the proposed model for automated glaucoma detection.
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Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 67 (2021) 102559
proposed model where the input image convolves with a group of ker­
nels (filters) that results in various significant feature maps. It acts
similarly to that of conventional CNN.
ReLU layer: The ReLU layer is placed after the convolutional and
compression layer which helps to include non-linearity in the model.
This activation outputs input value if it is positive otherwise it outputs
zero values.
Compression layer: The compression layer is introduced after the
convolutional layer to reduce the size of each feature map by multi­
plying with a weighted feature transformation matrix (also called
kernel). The major advantage of including such a layer is to filter the
required features based on the learned weights. The compression pro­
cess can be simply treated as a 2D matrix multiplication. For a given
input volume of size M1 × N1 × Q1 and the weight matrix of size N1 × N1∗ ,
the output volume of compression block is of size M1 × N1∗ × Q1 , where
N1 ≪N∗1 .
Summation and sigmoid activation layer: In the summation layer,
the output activation of the compression block is summed across the
depth and is then flattened to produce a 1D vector for each image. The
flattened output is finally applied to sigmoid activation to obtain the
final feature vector.
2.1. Proposed ECNet framework
The proposed ECNet framework involves one convolutional layer,
one compression layer, two ReLU layers and one summation layer fol­
lowed by a sigmoid activation layer. In the convolutional layer, a group
of random filters are used to convolve with the image. This layer inputs a
fundus image I of size m × n × p (i.e., 64 × 64 × 3 in our work) and
convolves with f (i.e., 32 in this work) filters of size x1 × y1 × z1 (i.e.,
5 × 5 ×3). The convolution is accomplished with stride 1 and padding,
and thus generates a stacked volume of size m × n × f (i.e.,
64 × 64 × 32). The ReLU activation is then applied on the result of the
convolutional layer. The compression operation is then performed using
a kernel of size x2 × y2 (i.e., 64 × 10) across depth f to obtain a lower
dimensional volume of size m × y2 × f (i.e., 64 × 10 × 32). Here, the
conditions such as x2 = n and y2 ≪ n should be satisfied. The responses of
this layer are then summed across the depth to derive a single feature
map of size m × y2 (i.e., 64 × 10). Then, the output of the preceding layer
is applied to a non-linear function namely, sigmoid to limit the feature
values within a range. The output of the last layer is flattened and we
eventually obtain a feature vector of size (m * y2) × 1 (i.e., 640 × 1). An
overview of different layers of the proposed feature extractor and their
responses are graphically illustrated in Fig. 3.
2.2. Mathematical formulation for feature learning
Our ECNet model has two layers: convolutional and compression
layer that includes learnable parameters. The weights associated in
these layers are randomly initialized and an optimization algorithm is
thereafter used to tune the parameters based on criteria that maximizes
D.R. Nayak et al. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 67 (2021) 102559

Fig. 3. Architecture of the proposed ECNet model.

the distance between the mean of different classes and minimizes the 2.3.1. Population initialization
variance of individual classes. Based on these conditions, we formulated The RCGA uses a set of random solutions known as population to find
the feature extraction task as a multi-objective optimization problem the best solution. Here, an individual solution comprises a set of weights
and is given by, that is defined as
( )
∑ω ∑ ω ∑ D ℙl (θ1 , θ2 ) = [θ11 , θ21 , …, θa1 , θ12 , θ22 , …, θb2 ] (4)
Maximize M(θ1 , θ2 ) = |μi,d − μj,d | (1)
where a = x1 * y1 * z1 * f, b = x2 * y2, and l = 1, 2, …, popsize.
i=1 j=i+1 d=1

ω
∑ ∑
D
Minimize V(θ1 , θ2 ) = σ2i,d (2) 2.3.2. Fitness evaluation
i=1 d=1 The purpose of using the optimization technique is to obtain a
network that can extract optimal features from raw fundus images for
where θ1 and θ1 indicate weights of convolutional and compression fil­ glaucoma detection. The mean distance and variance for all classes are
ters respectively, ω denoted number of classes, D denotes feature evaluated using (1) and (2). To satisfy the multi-objective criteria, two
dimension, σ2i and μi denote variance and mean of ith class for a feature types of fitness have been taken into consideration to select the best
set Fθ1,θ1 which is defined as performing parents using the roulette wheel selection technique and
f
∑ comparing new with old solutions. The comparison is required to in­
θ1 ,θ2
Fi,j = [(Ii,j ⊗ θq1 ) × θ2 ] (3) crease intra-class distance and minimize the inter-class variance. The
q=1 mathematical details are presented in the following sections.

where j = 1, 2, …, Ni, i = 1, 2, …, ω, Ii,j denotes jth sample of ith class, 2.3.3. Selection
and Fi,j
θ1 ,θ2
indicates its corresponding features. The selection of parents is one of the major steps of RCGA as domi­
nant parents lead to global optimum. For this purpose, the roulette
2.3. RCGA based multi-objective optimization wheel selection method has been employed in this work which needs a
probability value per individual to complete the selection process.
Meta-heuristic optimization techniques have been drawing signifi­ However, two optimization criteria are used in this study as stated in (1)
cant attention in the past few decades due to their advantages of not and (2). Hence, to obtain a single probability value that satisfy our ob­
requiring gradient information, bypassing the local optima, and relying jectives, we designed a combined probability function as follows.
on simple concepts. Hence, they have been employed extensively in
Mℙl (θ1 , θ2 ) Vℙl (θ1 , θ2 )
tuning parameters of various machine learning algorithms. These meta- Oℙl (θ1 , θ2 ) = α ∗ ∑ω ℙi − β ∗ ∑ω ℙi (5)
M (θ , θ ) i=1 V (θ1 , θ2 )
heuristic algorithms are mainly designed based on natural or biological i=1 1 2

phenomena and is generally classified into different kinds such as evo­

where α and β are the two weighting factors for two objectives. Here, we
lution and swarm-based techniques. The genetic algorithm (GA) [38]
set α and β values as 0.2 and 0.8 respectively with an aim to provide a
has been considered to be the most popular evolutionary method to date
higher weight to the second objective. The above function converts two
which was proposed by Holland. Later a complete review of GA was
criteria into one probability function that is used in roulette wheel se­
given by Goldberg [39] who initiated the basis of the modern GA. The
lection to select the optimum performing parents P1 and P2.
early GA utilizes binary coding that only maps to discrete values in the
search space, thus the accuracy of the solution is not precise. Moreover,
2.3.4. Crossover
the need for frequent encoding and decoding increases the calculation
The crossover generates new solutions from the selected parents. In
time. The precision of solutions is regulated by the encoding length and
our work, the modified simulated binary crossover operation [41] is
hence, to achieve high performance, the binary coding may need too
used. Mathematically, the crossover operation is described as follows
lengthy codes that result in excessive computing, memory space and
reduced computational speed. The real coded genetic algorithm (RCGA) C1 = 0.5[(1 + φ)P1 + (1 − φ)P2 ]
(6)
was developed to tackle these issues that operate on real values. The C2 = 0.5[(1 − φ)P1 + (1 + φ)P2 ]
important features of RCGA include high precision, larger search space,
no need of coding and decoding, fast convergence, simple computing, where φ denotes polynomial probability distribution and P1, P2 are
and less chance to fall into a local extreme value [40]. Different steps of parents chosen from the set of {Pl}. The φ is defined as follows
RCGA are described in the following to find the best solution for the ⎧ η
⎨ 0.5(η + 1)u , if u ≥ 1
given optimization problem. φ= (7)
⎩ 0.5(η + 1) 1
η+2 , otherwise
u

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D.R. Nayak et al. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 67 (2021) 102559

where u is spread factor and η is distribution index. Here, η is set to 2 and
the value of u varies randomly in range [0,2] for each crossover
operation.
2.3.5. Mutation
Mutation helps to explore the solution space. In this work, we used
the normally distributed mutation [42]. The mutation operation applied
on the newly generated offspring is expressed as
Cij = Cij + N(0, ν) (8)
available at [43]. The overall flowchart of the optimization model is
given in Fig. 4.
2.4. Classification
After learning the weights using the multi-objective RCGA method
from the training set, the final feature vectors are generated. The clas­
sification is then performed using different standard classifiers such as
SVM, KNN, BPNN, extreme learning machine (ELM) and kernel ELM (K-
ELM) [44].

where N(.) indicates normal distribution with variance ν and mean 0. 3. Experiments and results

2.3.6. Solution replacement strategy In this section, we present the materials used and results obtained
To compare the newly generated offspring with the existing parents, from all the experiments. The efficacy of proposed ECNet model was
the following replacement strategy has been formulated. tested on a larger dataset and the results for various combinations of
{ optimization techniques and classifiers were computed. A comparative
Ci if (MCi − VCi > MPj − VPj )
Pnew
j = (9) analysis was also performed with the existing automated methods. We
Pj otherwise
executed all experiments on a machine with 48 GB RAM and Xenon
where Pnew represents jth parent chosen from the population and Ci 2.4 GHz processor.
j
denotes the newly generated offspring. The code of our model is publicly

Fig. 4. Flowchart for RCGA based parameter optimization.

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D.R. Nayak et al. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 67 (2021) 102559

3.1. Dataset used Table 3

Summary of classification performance using different optimization methods.
To validate our proposed model, we consider a dataset consisting of Optimization method Classifier ACC SEN SPE F1-score
1426 retinal fundus images, of which 837 images are of glaucoma type
KNN 0.9603 0.9402 0.9887 0.9652
and 589 images are of normal type. These images were collected from SVM 0.9720 0.9602 0.9887 0.9757
Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, India using a Zeiss FF 450 fundus RCGA ELM 0.9252 0.9163 0.9379 0.9350
camera. The detailed description of the dataset can be found in [2,37]. K-ELM 0.9416 0.9283 0.9605 0.9491
BPNN 0.8505 0.8645 0.8305 0.8715

KNN 0.8832 0.8765 0.8927 0.8980

3.2. Experimental setup and performance metrics used SVM 0.9416 0.9363 0.9492 0.9495
DE ELM 0.8925 0.9084 0.8701 0.9084
The original fundus images were initially resized to 64 × 64 pixels K-ELM 0.9206 0.9243 0.9153 0.9317
and then fed to the proposed ECNet model. The statistical set up was BPNN 0.8084 0.7131 0.9435 0.8136
kept similar to the work reported in [2,37] i.e., 70% of the total samples KNN 0.9019 0.9124 0.8870 0.9160
(586 glaucoma and 412 normal) was used for training and the rest 30% SVM 0.9252 0.9402 0.9040 0.9365
samples were used for testing. The model was run fifty times to verify its PSO ELM 0.9229 0.9363 0.9040 0.9344
K-ELM 0.9299 0.9402 0.9153 0.9402
stability. The effectiveness of RCGA was compared against two widely
BPNN 0.8224 0.9841 0.5932 0.8667
used meta-heuristics approaches such as particle swarm optimization
(PSO), and differential evolution (DE). To derive a fair comparison, we Bold signifies the best results which has been obtained by our proposed model.
set similar values for the common parameters like population size (i.e.,
50) and the number of iterations (i.e., 100). For classification, several by each combination among all fifty runs.
classifiers such as SVM, KNN, BPNN, ELM and K-ELM were employed. The convergence plot between the ‘mean-variance’ and number of
The parameters of all the methods used and their settings are tabulated iterations for RCGA, PSO and DE methods is illustrated in Fig. 6. It can be
in Table 2. observed that the RCGA based optimization obtained the best curves
To evaluate the efficacy of the proposed model, various performance compared to other methods.
metrics such as accuracy (ACC), sensitivity (SEN), specificity (SPE) and To test the generability and stability of the model, the performance of
F1-score have been used. the model was evaluated fifty times and the results are shown in Fig. 7. It
can be seen that the performance obtained over all runs are similar in
most of the runs and varies to very little extent in few runs. An average
3.3. Results
accuracy of 96.37% has been achieved which is the highest when
compared with state-of-the-art methods.
The RCGA, PSO and DE techniques have been used to optimize the
filter weights of our proposed ECNet model and their performances are
compared with a set of classifiers as shown in Table 3. It can be seen that 3.4. k-fold CV results
the RCGA optimization along with the SVM classifier outperformed
other combinations of methods. Fig. 5 depicts the confusion matrices To test the robustness of the proposed model, the proposed ECNet
obtained by ECNet and SVM with RCGA, PSO and DE techniques over model has been evaluated using 10-fold cross validation (CV) strategy.
the testing samples of the dataset. Our model (ECNet+RCGA and SVM) The average ten fold results for three methods such as RCGA, PSO and
yielded a higher accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and F1-score of 0.9720, DE are tabulated in Table 4. In this experiment, only SVM classifier has
0.9602, 0.9887 and 0.9757 respectively. It is worth mentioning here been taken into consideration since it obtained comparatively better
that the results shown in Table 3 are the highest performance obtained performance than other classifiers as shown in Table 3. From Table 4, it
is evident that the proposed model achieved promising classification
results under 10-fold CV scheme. Also, it can be seen that the RCGA
Table 2
Parameters of different methods and their setting. based ECNet model outperformed DE and PSO based methods.

Method Parameter Value (s)

3.5. Comparison with state-of-the-art methods
Population size 50
Maximum iteration 100
RCGA Crossover rate 0.6 The performance of the proposed model is compared with state-of-
η 2 the-art methods using the same dataset (1426 fundus images) and is
ν 0.001 shown in Table 5. We obtained the highest average classification accu­
Population size 50 racy of 96.37% compared to both machine learning and deep learning
PSO Maximum iteration 100 based approaches. It can be noticed that the CNN based models achieved
c1 and c2 2 comparable results using the same dataset. However, the CNN models in
Population size 50 [33] and [4] required huge number of learnable parameters such as
DE
Maximum iteration 100 ≈13.6 million and ≈3.5 million respectively. On the other hand, the
Crossover rate 0.8
proposed ECNet model required only ≈0.003 million parameters. It may
Scaling factor [0,1]
be noted that, statistical setting is kept same for all the methods in
Kernel RBF Table 5.
SVM C 104
Apart from earning higher detection accuracy, the proposed ECNet
γ 10
method has the following major advantages: it requires comparatively
Activation function Gaussian
fewer number of parameters for efficient feature learning, it eliminates
K-ELM Hidden neurons 300
Gaussian width 0.01
the requirement for handcrafted feature extraction, and it is free from
gradient-based algorithms. Moreover, it can learn relevant and high-
k 3
KNN level features with less number of training samples. This is possibly
Distance metric Euclidean distance
due to the application of optimization criteria considered in our study.
Learning rate 0.001 The proposed scheme can be adopted as a supplementary tool for early
BPNN
Hidden neurons 400
glaucoma analysis and facilitates clinical advising.

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D.R. Nayak et al.
Fig. 5. Confusion matrices obtained using different optimization techniques with SVM classifier: (a) RCGA, (b) DE, and (c) PSO.
Fig. 6. Convergence plots of different optimization algorithms.
4. Conclusion
This paper proposed a novel non-handcrafted feature extraction
technique called ECNet for efficient glaucoma detection using fundus
images. The model composed of a sequence of convolutional,
compression, ReLU and summation layers to generate meaningful fea­
tures. A real-coded genetic algorithm was used to tune the parameters of
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Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 67 (2021) 102559
Fig. 7. Performance plot obtained by the model in different runs.
the learnable layers. A set of classifiers was employed to carry out the
classification task. Experimental results and comparisons confirmed the
superiority of ECNet+RCGA and SVM method over other state-of-the-art
techniques. The model obtained a higher performance with an accuracy
of 97.20% and can hence aid ophthalmologists to validate their
screening. In future, the developed model can be used to detect the
various stages of glaucoma automatically.
D.R. Nayak et al. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 67 (2021) 102559

Table 4 [8] J.E. Morgan, N.J.L. Sheen, R.V. North, Y. Choong, E. Ansari, Digital imaging of the
Performance evaluation of different models using 10-fold CV strategy. optic nerve head: monoscopic and stereoscopic analysis, Br. J. Ophthalmol. 89 (7)
(2005) 879–884.
Method ACC SEN SPE F1-score [9] J. Cheng, J. Liu, Y. Xu, F. Yin, D.W.K. Wong, et al., Superpixel classification based
optic disc and optic cup segmentation for glaucoma screening, IEEE Trans. Med.
RCGA and SVM 0.9804 0.9749 0.9881 0.9831 Imaging 32 (6) (2013) 1019–1032.
DE and SVM 0.9537 0.9438 0.9677 0.9599 [10] G.D. Joshi, J. Sivaswamy, S.R. Krishnadas, Optic disk and cup segmentation from
PSOand SVM 0.9453 0.9415 0.9508 0.9529 monocular color retinal images for glaucoma assessment, IEEE Trans. Med.
Imaging 30 (6) (2011) 1192–1205.
Bold signifies the best results which has been obtained by our proposed model. [11] J. Cheng, F. Yin, D.W.K. Wong, D. Tao, J. Liu, Sparse dissimilarity-constrained
coding for glaucoma screening, IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. 62 (5) (2015)
1395–1403.
Table 5 [12] M.-L. Huang, H.-Y. Chen, W.-C. Huang, Y.-Y. Tsai, Linear discriminant analysis and
Performance comparison with state-of-the-art automated glaucoma detection artificial neural network for glaucoma diagnosis using scanning laser polarimetry-
variable cornea compensation measurements in Taiwan Chinese population,
methods using the same dataset. Graefe’s Arch. Clin. Exp. Ophthalmol. 248 (3) (2010) 435–441.
Method Classifier ACC (%) [13] U.R. Acharya, S. Dua, X. Du, C.K. Chua, et al., Automated diagnosis of glaucoma
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This work is supported by the Science and Engineering Research glaucoma identification using non-parametric spatial envelope energy spectrum
Board (SERB), Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India with fundus images, Biocybern. Biomed. Eng. 38 (1) (2018) 170–180.
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Declaration of Competing Interest 13 (13) (2019) 2401–2408.
[28] S. Maheshwari, V. Kanhangad, R.B. Pachori, S.V. Bhandary, U.R. Acharya,
Automated glaucoma diagnosis using bit-plane slicing and local binary pattern
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