Survey on Various Methods of Detecting Glaucoma

Abstract

Glaucoma is an irreversible chronic eye disease it leads to vision loss. It is an eye disease which occurs due to the increased/decreased fluid pressure inside the eye. The pressure inside the normal eye is usually below 21mm of Hg. But when the pressure inside the eye(s) increases more than 21mm of Hg, the optic nerve gets damaged. This can permanently damage vision in the effected eye(s) and can lead to blindness if left untreated. The available scanning methods glaucoma are Heidelberg Retinal Tomography (HRT), Scanning Laser Polarimetry (SLP) and Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). The existing methods are expensive and require experienced clinicians to use them. So, there is a need to diagnose glaucoma accurately with low cost. As the symptoms only occur when the disease is quite advanced so that glaucoma is called the silent thief of sight. Glaucoma cannot be cured, but its development can be slowed down by treatment. Therefore, detecting glaucoma in time is critical. Manual analysis of the eye is time consuming and the accuracy of the parameter measurements also varies with different clinicians. To overcome these problems with manual analysis, the objective of this survey is to introduce a method to automatically analyze the fundus images of the eye. Automatic analysis of this disease is much more effective than manual analysis.