Using Pyramid Vision Transformer for Assisting Glaucoma Diagnosis with Small Datasets

Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of blindness worldwide. Patients with open-angle glaucoma have difficulty realizing the graduate vision loss. However, the optic nerve head's morphological change can manifest in the retinal image. Therefore, many studies offer computer-aided glaucoma diagnosis based on retinal image analysis. With the trend of deep learning, there have been several attempts to utilise deep-learning-based glaucoma classification in practice. However, the limited size of the dataset is a problem when adapting deep-learning models to glaucoma classification. Therefore, we test three vision transformer models to handle this problem and demonstrate their performance in glaucoma classification. Also, based on their performance, we give suggestions for their usage in clinical practice. In this paper, we fine-tuned three transformer models for glaucoma classification using two datasets, RIM-ONE_DL and Drishti-GS. Based on our experiments, the pyramid vision transformer (PVT) model achieves the best performance, with good scores in terms of accuracy and sensitivity. This suggests that the PVT can catch the missing detail and can be used to support the glaucoma diagnosis.