Interactive tool and database for optic disc and cup segmentation of stereo and monocular retinal fundus images

Abstract

Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of irreversible blindness in the world. Early detection is essential to delay its evolution and avoid vision loss. For this purpose, retinal fundus images can be used to assess the cup-to-disc ratio, the main indicator of glaucoma. Several automatic methods have been developed to compute this indicator, but the lack of ground truth of the optic disc and cup is an obstacle to evaluate and compare their results. In order to support clinicians to perform this task, an interactive tool for the segmentation of the disc and cup on stereo and monocular retinal fundus images has been developed. By using this tool, we have also built a new database of 159 stereo fundus images with two ground truth of disc and cup. The application and the database are both publicly available online. This work can serve as a learning environment for clinicians, as well as to evaluate the results of automatic segmentation algorithms.