A clinical utility assessment of the automatic measurement method of the quality of Meibomian glands

• Published in: Biomedical engineering online Vol. 16; no. 1; p. 82
• Main Authors: Koprowski, Robert, Tian, Lei, Olczyk, Paweł
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England BioMed Central Ltd 24-06-2017; BioMed Central; BMC
• Subjects: Automatic analysis; Automation; Biomedical; Case-Control Studies; Contact lenses; Cysts; Data processing; Diagnosis; Dry eye; Evaporation; Eye; Eye diseases; Eyelid Diseases - diagnostic imaging; Eyelid Diseases - physiopathology; Female; Glands; Health aspects; Humans; Image processing; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Inflammation; Intervention; Lipids; Male; Meibomian gland dysfuction; Meibomian Glands - diagnostic imaging; Meibomian Glands - physiopathology; Men; Patients; Petroleum production; Qualitative analysis; Quality; Signal processing; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; Stellar mass; Sun; Womens health; Beijing China; China; Singapore; Meibomian gland dysfuction; Image processing; Automatic analysis; Dry eye; Biomedical
• ISSN: 1475-925X; 1475-925X
• DOI: 10.1186/s12938-017-0373-4

Meibomian gland dysfunction (MGD) is one of the most common diseases observed in clinics and is the leading cause of evaporative dry eye. Today, diagnostics of MGD is not fully automatic yet and is based on a qualitative assessment made by an ophthalmologist. Therefore, an automatic analysis method was developed to assess MGD quantiatively.
The analysis made use of 228 images of 57 patients recorded by OCULUS Keratograph
5 M with a resolution of 1024 × 1360 pixels concern 30 eyes of healthy individuals (14 women and 16 men) and 27 eyes of sick patients (10 women and 17 men). The diagnosis of dry eye was made according to the consensus of DED in China (2013).
The presented method of analysis is a new, developed method enabling an automatic, reproducible and quantitative assessment of Meibomian glands. The analysis relates to employing the methods of analysis and image processing. The analysis was conducted in the Matlab environment Version 7.11.0.584, R2010b, Java VM Version: Java 1.6.0_17-b04 with Sun Microsystems Inc. with toolboxes: Statistical, Signal Processing and Image Processing.
The presented, new method of analysis of Meibomian glands is fully automatic, does not require operator's intervention, allows obtaining reproducible results and enables a quantitative assessment of Meibomian glands. Compared to the other known methods, particularly with the method described in literature it allows obtaining better sensitivity (98%) and specificity (100%) results by 2%.