JustRAIGS: Justified Referral in AI Glaucoma Screening Challenge

A major contributor to permanent vision loss is glaucoma. Early diagnosis is crucial for preventing vision loss due to glaucoma, making glaucoma screening essential. A more affordable method of glaucoma screening can be achieved by applying artificial intelligence to evaluate color fundus photographs (CFPs). We present the Justified Referral in AI Glaucoma Screening (JustRAIGS) challenge to further develop these AI algorithms for glaucoma screening and to assess their efficacy. To support this challenge, we have generated a distinctive big dataset containing more than 110,000 meticulously labeled CFPs obtained from approximately 60,000 patients and 500 distinct screening centers in the USA. Our objective is to assess the practicality of creating advanced and dependable AI systems that can take a CFP as input and produce the probability of referable glaucoma, as well as outputs for glaucoma justification by integrating both binary and multi-label classification tasks. This paper presents the evaluation of solutions provided by nine teams, recognizing the team with the highest level of performance. The highest achieved score of sensitivity at a specificity level of 95% was 85%, and the highest achieved score of Hamming losses average was 0.13. Additionally, we test the top three participants’ algorithms on an external dataset to validate the performance and generalization of these models. The outcomes of this research can offer valuable insights into the development of intelligent systems for detecting glaucoma. Ultimately, findings can aid in the early detection and treatment of glaucoma patients, hence decreasing preventable vision impairment and blindness caused by glaucoma.