Selected parameters of the corneal deformation in the Corvis tonometer

Contemporary ophthalmology knows many methods of measuring intraocular pressure, namely the methods of non-contact and impression applanation tonometry. In non-contact applanation tonometers, e.g. the Corvis, the corneal flattening is caused by an air puff. Image registration of the corneal deflection performed by a tonometer enables to determine other interesting biomechanical parameters of the eye, which are not available in the tonometer. The measurement of new selected parameters is presented in this paper.

Images with an M × N × I resolution of 200 × 576 × 140 pixels were acquired from the Corvis device in the source recording format *.cst. A total of 13'400 2D images of patients examined routinely in the Clinical Department of Ophthalmology, in District Railway Hospital in Katowice, Poland, were analysed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. A new method has been proposed for the analysis of corneal deflection images in the Corvis tonometer with the use of the Canny edge detection method, mathematical morphology methods and context-free operations.

The resulting image analysis tool allows determination of the response of the cornea and the entire eyeball to an air puff. The paper presents the method that enables the measurement of the amplitude of curvature changes in the frequency range from 150 to 500 Hz and automatic designation of the eyeball movement direction. The analysis of these data resulted in 3 new features of dynamics of the eye reaction to an air puff. Classification of these features enabled to propose 4 classes of deformation. The proposed algorithm allows to obtain reproducible results fully automatically at a time of 5 s per patient using the Core i5 CPU M460 @ 2.5GHz 4GB of RAM.

The paper presents the possibility of using a profiled algorithm of image analysis, proposed by the authors, to measure additional cornea deformation parameters. The new tool enables automatic measurement of the additional new parameters when using the Corvis tonometer. A detailed clinical examination based on this method will be presented in subsequent papers.