BackgroundComputer Aided Diagnosis (CAD), which can automate the detection process for ocular diseases, has attracted extensive attention from clinicians and researchers alike. It not only alleviates the burden on the clinicians by providing objective opinion with valuable insights, but also offers early detection and easy access for patients.MethodWe review ocular CAD methodologies for various data types. For each data type, we investigate the databases and the algorithms to detect different ocular diseases. Their advantages and shortcomings are analyzed and discussed.ResultWe have studied three types of data (i.e., clinical, genetic and imaging) that have been commonly used in existing methods for CAD. The recent developments in methods used in CAD of ocular diseases (such as Diabetic Retinopathy, Glaucoma, Age-related Macular Degeneration and Pathological Myopia) are investigated and summarized comprehensively.ConclusionWhile CAD for ocular diseases has shown considerable progress over the past years, the clinical importance of fully automatic CAD systems which are able to embed clinical knowledge and integrate heterogeneous data sources still show great potential for future breakthrough.
Introduction
Keloids are a prevalent chronic skin disorder with significant psychosocial morbidity. Intralesional corticosteroid injections are the first-line treatment but are painful and require repeated injections by medical professionals. Dissolving microneedles are a novel method of cutaneous drug delivery that induces minimal/no pain and can be self-administered. The objective of the study was to evaluate the efficacy and safety of triamcinolone-embedded dissolving microneedles in treatment of keloids.
Methods
This was a single-blind, intra-individual controlled two-phase clinical trial of 8-week duration each. Two keloids per subject were selected for (1) once-daily 2-min application with microneedles for 4 weeks, followed by no treatment for the next 4 weeks, or (2) non-intervention as control. Primary outcome was change in keloid volume as assessed by a high-resolution 3D scanner.
Results
There was significant reduction in keloid volume compared with controls after 4 weeks of treatment. This reduction was greater with a higher dosage of triamcinolone used.
Conclusions
Once-daily application of dissolving triamcinolone-embedded microneedles significantly reduced the volume of keloids. The treatment was safe, can be self-administered and can serve as an alternative for patients unsuitable for conventional treatments.
Trial Registration
Trial Registry: Health Science Authority (Singapore) Clinical Trials Register Registration number: 2015/00440.
The in vivo assessment and visualization of skin structures can be performed through the use of high resolution optical coherence tomography imaging, also known as HD-OCT. However, the manual assessment of such images can be exhaustive and time consuming. In this paper, we present an analysis system to automatically identify and quantify the skin characteristics such as the topography of the surface of the skin and thickness of the epidermis in HD-OCT images. Comparison of this system with manual clinical measurements demonstrated its potential for automatic objective skin analysis and diseases diagnosis. To our knowledge, this is the first report of an automated system to process and analyse HD-OCT skin images.
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