Characteristic Quantities of Corneal Epithelial Structures in Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopic Volume Data Sets

Abstract

Several characteristic morphologic quantities can be calculated using this methodology without manual intervention. Our study demonstrated promising results and suggests that this fully automated morphologic quantification can be successfully applied to assess microstructural changes of the epithelium in normal and various corneal disorders.

Quantitative assessment of central and limbal epithelium after long-term wear of soft contact lenses and in patients with dry eyes: a pilot study

“…The distance between two optical sections was about 0.4 μm, as determined earlier. 5 From 960 images, a single cycle (160 images) of best sequence has been selected from each examined eye. For the automatic cell analysis, two consecutive optical sections of intermediate cell layer and two consecutive sections of basal cell layer were selected from each sequence.…”

“…5 Initially, the images were magnified by a factor of 4 and the central 60% of overall dimension was used for cell segmentation to exclude image borders with low contrast. Inverted images were smoothed and enhanced using different image filters, finally image artefacts and incorrectly segmented cells were deleted for quantification.…”

“…5 Here we have studied two different corneal conditions that include contact lens wearing subjects 9,10 who are prone to develop mechanical or hypoxia-related corneal changes and subjects with dry eyes where corneal epithelium is stressed due to tear film insufficiency and frequent application of artificial tear drops. 11 The purpose of this study was to quantify and compare the morphological features of the central and limbal epithelium between normal and other corneal conditions.…”

“…Today, due to the significant advancements in the optical properties of the confocal microscopy, the image quality has been dramatically improved and the digital computing systems enable compression and storage of huge data sets for the further processing of the images for the quantification of cellular structural alterations. [3][4][5] Recently, in vivo confocal microscopy (IVCM) was used in studying the anatomical structures of the corneal and limbal epithelium 4 particularly the palisades of Vogt (POV) including inter-palisadal epithelial rete pegs. POV 6 are clinically visible radially oriented fibrovascular ridges observed along the upper and the lower corneoscleral limbus.…”

“…To minimize these errors, we have used a fully automated software base 5 with advanced image acquisition protocols and segmentation routines for the quantification of features of the epithelial cells.…”