A Multimodal Deep Learning Model for Predicting Future Visual Field in Glaucoma Patients

Glaucoma is one of the most common reasons for blindness worldwide, especially in elderly people. Glaucoma can be monitored and treated using visual field (VF) tests. Therefore, predicting the future VF to monitor progression of glaucoma is important. In this paper, we proposed a deep learning model to predict future VF based on previous VF and optical coherence tomography (OCT) images (including thickness map, vertical tomogram, and horizontal tomogram). The image data were analyzed using a ResNet-50 model. Image features and previous VFs were combined, and a long short-term memory (LSTM) network was used to predict future VF. A weighted method was used to detect noisy data. The proposed method was improved when applying weighted loss. The mean absolute error (MAE) was 3.31 ± 1.37, and the root mean square error (RMSE) was 4.58 ± 1.77. The model showed high performance when combining VF data and OCT image data. Furthermore, the model was useful for detecting and re-weighting noisy data.