Tracking the Dynamics of the Tear Film Lipid Layer
This work addresses Dry Eye Disease diagnosis for patients and clinicians, but it is incremental as it applies existing computer vision techniques to a new medical imaging domain.
The authors tackled the problem of analyzing tear film lipid layer spread to aid in diagnosing Dry Eye Disease, developing a computer vision tracking algorithm that processes videos collected with a micro-interferometer.
Dry Eye Disease (DED) is one of the most common ocular diseases: over five percent of US adults suffer from DED. Tear film instability is a known factor for DED, and is thought to be regulated in large part by the thin lipid layer that covers and stabilizes the tear film. In order to aid eye related disease diagnosis, this work proposes a novel paradigm in using computer vision techniques to numerically analyze the tear film lipid layer (TFLL) spread. Eleven videos of the tear film lipid layer spread are collected with a micro-interferometer and a subset are annotated. A tracking algorithm relying on various pillar computer vision techniques is developed. Our method can be found at https://easytear-dev.github.io/.