Methods Inf Med 2003; 42(01): 99-103
DOI: 10.1055/s-0038-1634214
Original article
Schattauer GmbH

Diagnosis of Glaucoma by Indirect Classifiers

A. Peters
1   Department of Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology, Germany
,
B. Lausen
1   Department of Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology, Germany
,
G. Michelson
2   Department of Ophthalmology and Eye Hospital, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany
,
O. Gefeller
1   Department of Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology, Germany
› Author Affiliations
Further Information

Publication History

Received: 28 March 2002

Accepted: 20 August 2002

Publication Date:
07 February 2018 (online)

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Summary

Objectives: Demonstration of the applicability of a framework called indirect classification to the example of glaucoma classification. Indirect classification combines medical a priori knowledge and statistical classification methods. The method is compared to direct classification approaches with respect to the estimated misclassification error.

Methods: Indirect classification is applied using classification trees and the diagnosis of glaucoma. Misclassification errors are reduced by bootstrap aggregation. As direct classification methods linear discriminant analysis, classification trees and bootstrap aggregated classification trees are utilized in the problem of glaucoma diagnosis. Misclassification rates are estimated via 10-fold cross-validation.

Results: Indirect classification techniques reduce the misclassification error in the context of glaucoma classification compared to direct classification methods.

Conclusions: Embedding a priori knowledge into statistical classification techniques can improve misclassification results. Indirect classification offers a framework to realize this combination.