Qinying Chen

Qinying Chen, Tobin Driscoll

The tear film (TF) plays a critical role in maintaining ocular surface health, and its disruption through tear breakup (TBU) is closely associated with dry eye disease. Evaporation-driven thinning is a primary mechanism underlying TBU, yet quantitative in vivo estimates of key physical parameters remain limited. In this work, we fit an evaporation-driven TF thinning model, originally developed by Braun et al. and extended to two dimensions using proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) by Chen et al., to experimental fluorescence (FL) imaging data from normal subjects. The use of dimension reduction enables efficient solution of the governing PDEs and facilitates parameter estimation from imaging data. Our results provide in vivo estimates of evaporation-related and thinning parameters within TBU regions. These findings enhance understanding of TF thinning and dry-spot formation and establish a quantitative baseline for comparison with dry eye patient data.

Qinying Chen, Arnab Roy, Tobin A. Driscoll

Tear film (TF) breakup is a key driver of understanding dry eye disease, yet estimating TF thickness and osmolarity from fluorescence (FL) imaging typically requires solving computationally expensive inverse problems. We propose an operator learning framework that replaces traditional inverse solvers with neural operators trained on simulated TF dynamics. This approach offers a scalable path toward rapid, data-driven analysis of tear film dynamics.

Kaiqi Chen, Jialing Liu, Qinying Chen et al.

Current pandemic has caused the medical system to operate under high load. To relieve it, robots with high autonomy can be used to effectively execute contactless operations in hospitals and reduce cross-infection between medical staff and patients. Although semantic Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technology can improve the autonomy of robots, semantic object association is still a problem that is worthy of being studied. The key to solving this problem is to correctly associate multiple object measurements of one object landmark by using semantic information, and to refine the pose of object landmark in real time. To this end, we propose a hierarchical object association strategy and a pose-refinement approach. The former one consists of two levels, i.e., a short-term object association and a global one. In the first level, we employ the multiple-object-tracking for short-term object association, through which the incorrect association among objects whose locations are close and appearances are similar can be avoided. Moreover, the short-term object association can provide more abundant object appearance and more robust estimation of object pose for the global object association in the second level. To refine the object pose in the map, we develop an approach to choose the optimal object pose from all object measurements associated with an object landmark. The proposed method is comprehensively evaluated on seven simulated hospital sequences1, a real hospital environment and the KITTI dataset. Experimental results show that our method has an obviously improvement in terms of robustness and accuracy for the object association and the trajectory estimation in the semantic SLAM.