Auto-GlaKG: Automated Biomarker Reasoning for Explainable Glaucoma Detection

Cheng Huang, Zeyu Han, Yian Hu, Yaopeng Ding, Jingxi Qiu +1

Interpretable glaucoma detection requires a transparent connection between fundus images, clinically meaningful biomarkers, and diagnostic predictions. Knowledge graph (KG) reasoning provides this structure, but performance measured using annotated biomarkers does not establish performance when only images are available. We present Auto-GlaKG, an automated framework that combines image-based biomarker prediction with fixed clinical-prior rules. A ResNet50 network predicts the cup-to-disc ratio (CDR) and six morphological signs using biomarker supervision, and a KG reasoner aggregates their signed rule contributions into a glaucoma score. On 689 fundus images evaluated using stratified, group-aware five-fold cross-validation, Auto-GlaKG achieves a pooled area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.951 (95\% confidence interval: 0.931--0.969), with sensitivity of 0.970 and specificity of 0.779. The matched image classifier also achieves an AUC of 0.951, while the rule stage adds 0.2~ms per image. Replacing predicted CDR with its annotation increases fold-mean AUC from 0.953 to 0.995. The framework provides an explicit rule-level account of image-based…