Weakly-supervised Metric Learning with Cross-Module Communications for the Classification of Anterior Chamber Angle Images

As the basis for developing glaucoma treatment strategies, Anterior Chamber Angle (ACA) evaluation is usually dependent on experts' Judgements. However, experienced ophthalmologists needed for these Judgements are not widely available. Thus, computer-aided ACA evaluations become a pressing and efficient solution for this issue. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end frame-work GCNet for automated Glaucoma Classification based on ACA images or other Glaucoma-related medical images. We first collect and label an ACA image dataset with some pixel-level annotations. Next, we introduce a segmentation module and an embedding module to enhance the performance of classifying ACA images. Within GCNet, we design a Cross-Module Aggregation Net (CMANet) which is a weakly-supervised metric learning network to capture contextual information exchanging across these modules. We conduct experiments on the ACA dataset and two public datasets REFUGE and SIGF. Our experimental results demonstrate that GCNet outperforms several state-of-the-art deep models in the tasks of glaucoma medical image classifications. The source code of GCNet can be found at https://github.com/Jingqi-H/GCNet.