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.