Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of visual impairment worldwide. If diagnosed too late, the disease can irreversibly cause severe damage to the optic nerve, resulting in permanent loss of central vision and blindness. Therefore, early diagnosis of the disease is critical. Recent advancements in machine learning techniques have greatly aided ophthalmologists in timely and efficient diagnosis through the use of automated systems. Training the machine learning models with the most informative features can significantly enhance their performance. However, selecting the most informative feature subset is a real challenge because there are 2n potential feature subsets for a dataset with n features, and the conventional feature selection techniques are also not very efficient. Thus, extracting relevant features from medical images and selecting the most informative is a challenging task. Additionally, a considerable field of study has evolved around the discovery and selection of highly influential features (characteristics) from a large number of features. Through the inclusion of the most informative features, this method has the potential to improve machine learning classifiers by enhancing their classification performance, reducing training and testing time, and lowering system diagnostic costs by incorporating the most informative features. This work aims in the same direction to propose a unique, novel, and highly efficient feature selection (FS) approach using the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), the Grey Wolf Optimization Algorithm (GWO), and a hybridized version of these two metaheuristics. To the best of our knowledge, the use of these two algorithms and their amalgamated version for FS in human disease prediction, particularly glaucoma prediction, has been rare in the past. The objective is to create a highly influential subset of characteristics using this approach. The suggested FS strategy seeks to maximize classification accuracy while reducing the total number of characteristics used. We evaluated the efficacy of the proposed approach in classifying eye-related glaucoma illnesses. In this study, we aim to assist professionals in identifying glaucoma by utilizing a proposed clinical decision support system that integrates image processing, soft-computing algorithms, and machine learning, and validates it on benchmark fundus images. Initially, we extract 65 features from the 646 retinal fundus images in the ORIGA benchmark dataset, from which a subset of features is created. For two-class classification, different machine learning classifiers receive the elected features. Employing 5-fold and 10-fold stratified cross-validation has enhanced the generalized performance of the proposed model. We assess performance using several well-established statistical criteria. The tests show that the suggested computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) model has an F1-score of 97.50%, an accuracy score of 96.50%, a precision score of 97%, a sensitivity score of 98.10%, a specificity score of 93.30%, and an AUC score of 94.2% on the ORIGA dataset. To demonstrate its excellence, we compared the suggested approach’s performance with other current state-of-the-art models. The suggested approach shows promising results in predicting glaucoma, potentially aiding in the early diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Furthermore, real-time applications showcase the proposed approach’s suitability, enabling its deployment in areas lacking expert medical practitioners. Overburdened expert ophthalmologists can use this approach as a second opinion, as it requires very little time for processing the retinal fundus images. The proposed model can also aid, after incorporating required modifications, in making clinical decisions for various diseases like lung infection and, diabetic retinopathy. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024.
