Convolutional neural network-based classification of glaucoma using optic radiation tissue properties
John Kruper, Adam Richie-Halford, Noah C. Benson, Sendy Caffarra, Julia P. Owen, Yue Wu, Catherine Egan, Aaron Lee, Cecilia S. Lee, Jason D. Yeatman, Ariel Rokem, Naomi E. Allen, Tariq Aslam, Denize Atan, Konstantinos Balaskas, Sarah Barman, Jenny Barrett, Paul Bishop, Graeme C. Black, Tasanee Braithwaite, Roxana O. Carare, Usha Chakravarthy, Michelle Chan, Sharon Chua, Alexander Day, Parul Desai, Bal Dhillon, Andrew D. Dick, Alex S. F. Doney, Catherine Egan, Sarah Ennis, Paul J. Foster, Marcus Fruttiger, John Gallacher, David F. Garway‐Heath, Jane Whitney Gibson, Jeremy A. Guggenheim, Christopher J. Hammond, Alison J. Hardcastle, Simon Harding, Ruth Hogg, Pirro G. Hysi, Pearse A. Keane, Peng T. Khaw, Anthony P. Khawaja, Gerassimos Lascaratos, Thomas J. Littlejohns, Andrew Lotery, Robert Luben, Philip J. Luthert, Tom MacGillivray, Sarah Mackie, Savita Madhusudhan, Bernadette McGuinness, Gareth J. McKay, Martin McKibbin, Tony Moore, James P. Morgan, Eoin O’Sullivan, Richard A. Oram, Christopher G. Owen, Praveen J. Patel, Euan Paterson, Tünde Pető, Axel Petzold, Nikolas Pontikos, Jugnoo S. Rahi, Alicja R. Rudnicka, Naveed Sattar, Jay Self, Panagiotis I. Sergouniotis, Sobha Sivaprasad, David Steel, Irene Stratton, Nicholas G. Strouthidis, Cathie Sudlow, Zihan Sun, Robyn J. Tapp, Dhanes Thomas, Mervyn G. Thomas, Emanuele Trucco, Adnan Tufail, Ananth C. Viswanathan, Véronique Vitart, Mike Weedon, Katie Williams, Cathy Williams, Jayne V. Woodside, Max Yates, Yalin Zheng
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Sensory changes due to aging or disease can impact brain tissue. This study aims to investigate the link between glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness, and alterations in brain connections. METHODS: We analyzed diffusion MRI measurements of white matter tissue in a large group, consisting of 905 glaucoma patients (aged 49-80) and 5292 healthy individuals (aged 45-80) from the UK Biobank. Confounds due to group differences were mitigated by matching a sub-sample of controls to glaucoma subjects. We compared classification of glaucoma using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) focusing on the optic radiations, which are the primary visual connection to the cortex, against those analyzing non-visual brain connections. As a control, we evaluated the performance of regularized linear regression models. RESULTS: We showed that CNNs using information from the optic radiations exhibited higher accuracy in classifying subjects with glaucoma when contrasted with CNNs relying on information from non-visual brain connections. Regularized linear regression models were also tested, and showed significantly weaker classification performance. Additionally, the CNN was unable to generalize to the classification of age-group or of age-related macular degeneration. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings indicate a distinct and potentially non-linear signature of glaucoma in the tissue properties of optic radiations. This study enhances our understanding of how glaucoma affects brain tissue and opens avenues for further research into how diseases that affect sensory input may also affect brain aging.