An efficient system for preprocessing confocal corneal images for subsequent analysis

Abstract

Abstract-A confocal microscope provides a sequence of images of the various corneal layers and structures at different depths from which medical clinicians can extract clinical information on the state of health of the patient's cornea. Preprocessing the confocal corneal images to make them suitable for analysis is very challenging due the nature of these images and the amount of the noise present in them. This paper presents an efficient preprocessing approach for confocal corneal images consisting of three main steps including enhancement, binarisation and refinement. Improved visualisation, cell counts and measurements of cell properties have been achieved through this system and an interactive graphical user interface has been developed.

A fully automated cell segmentation and morphometric parameter system for quantifying corneal endothelial cell morphology

“…The images acquired using CCM usually suffer from different types of artefact (e.g., blurring, noise, specular reflections, low contrast and non-uniform illumination) which makes the accurate detection of the cell contour a challenging task (Fig.3). The main reasons for the poor quality images are related to a number of factors in the acquisition process [22][2] including: (i) saccadic eye movement during image acquisition resulting in blurred images, (ii) differences in the pressure applied between the CCM Tomocap and cornea, (iii) the spherical shape of the cornea leads to non-regular distribution of the lighting in different corneal areas. The pre-processing stage aims to address these problems.…”