Glaucoma, which can cause irreversible damage to the sight of human eyes, is conventionally diagnosed by visual field (VF) sensitivity. However, it is labor-intensive and time-consuming to measure VF. Recently, optical coherence tomography (OCT) has been adopted to measure retinal layers thickness (RT) for assisting the diagnosis because glaucoma makes structural changes to RT and it is much less costly to obtain RT. In particular, RT can assist in mainly two manners. One is to estimate a VF from an RT such that clinical doctors only need to obtain an RT of a patient and then convert it to a VF for the diagnosis. The other is to predict future VFs by utilizing both past VFs and RTs, i.e., the prediction of progression of VF over time. The two computational tasks are performed as two data mining tasks because currently there is no knowledge about the exact form of the computations involved. In this paper, we study a novel problem which is the integration of the two data mining tasks. The motivation is that both the two data mining tasks deal with transforming information from the RT domain to the VF domain such that the knowledge discovered in one task can be useful for another. The integration is non-trivial because the two tasks do not share the way of transformation. To address this issue, we design a progression-agnostic and mode-independent (PAMI) module which facilitates cross-task knowledge utilization. We empirically demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method for the estimation by 6.33% in terms of mean of the root mean square error on a real dataset, and outperforms the state-of-the-art method for the progression prediction by 3.49% for the best case.

Prediction of glaucomatous visual field loss has significant clinical benefits because it can help with early detection of glaucoma as well as decision-making for treatments. Glaucomatous visual loss is conventionally captured through visual field sensitivity (VF ) measurement, which is costly and time-consuming. Thus, existing approaches mainly predict future VF utilizing limited VF data collected in the past. Recently, optical coherence tomography (OCT) has been adopted to measure retinal layers thickness (RT ) for considerably more low-cost treatment assistance. There then arises an important question in the context of ophthalmology: are RT measurements beneficial for VF prediction? In this paper, we propose a novel method to demonstrate the benefits provided by RT measurements. The challenge is management of the two heterogeneities of VF data and RT data as RT data are collected according to different clinical schedules and lie in a different space to VF data. To tackle these heterogeneities, we propose latent progression patterns (LPPs), a novel type of representations for glaucoma progression. Along with LPPs, we propose a method to transform VF series to an LPP based on matrix factorization and a method to transform RT series to an LPP based on deep neural networks. Partial VF and RT information is integrated in LPPs to provide accurate prediction. The proposed framework is named deeply-regularized latent-space linear regression (\em DLLR). We empirically demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art technique by 12% for the best case in terms of the mean of the root mean square error on a real dataset.

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.

Dense measurements of visual-field, which is necessary to detect glaucoma, is known as very costly and labor intensive. Recently, measurement of retinal-thickness can be less costly than measurement of visual-field. Thus, it is sincerely desired that the retinal-thickness could be transformed into visual-sensitivity data somehow. In this paper, we propose two novel methods to estimate the sensitivity of the visual-field with SITA-Standard mode 10-2 resolution using retinal-thickness data measured with optical coherence tomography (OCT). The first method called Affine-Structured Non-negative Matrix Factorization (ASNMF) which is able to cope with both the estimation of visual-field and the discovery of deep glaucoma knowledge. While, the second is based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) which demonstrates very high estimation performance. These methods are kinds of multi-view learning methods because they utilize visual-field and retinal thickness data simultaneously. We experimentally tested the performance of our methods from several perspectives. We found that ASNMF worked better for relatively small data size while CNNs did for relatively large data size. In addition, some clinical knowledge are discovered via ASNMF. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to address the dense estimation of the visual-field based on the retinal-thickness data.