Novel Machine-Learning Based Framework Using Electroretinography Data for the Detection of Early-Stage Glaucoma

Purpose: Early-stage glaucoma diagnosis has been a challenging problem in ophthalmology. The current state-of-the-art glaucoma diagnosis techniques do not completely leverage the functional measures' such as electroretinogram's immense potential; instead, focus is on structural measures like optical coherence tomography. The current study aims to take a foundational step toward the development of a novel and reliable predictive framework for early detection of glaucoma using machine-learning-based algorithm capable of leveraging medically relevant information that ERG signals contain.

Methods: ERG signals from 60 eyes of DBA/2 mice were grouped for binary classification based on age. The signals were also grouped based on intraocular pressure (IOP) for multiclass classification. Statistical and wavelet-based features were engineered and extracted. Important predictors (ERG tests and features) were determined, and the performance of five machine learning-based methods were evaluated.

Results: Random forest (bagged trees) ensemble classifier provided the best performance in both binary and multiclass classification of ERG signals. An accuracy of 91.7 and 80% was achieved for binary and multiclass classification, respectively, suggesting that machine-learning-based models can detect subtle changes in ERG signals if trained using advanced features such as those based on wavelet analyses.

Conclusions: The present study describes a novel, machine-learning-based method to analyze ERG signals providing additional information that may be used to detect early-stage glaucoma. Based on promising performance metrics obtained using the proposed machine-learning-based framework leveraging an established ERG data set, we conclude that the novel framework allows for detection of functional deficits of early/various stages of glaucoma in mice.