Tear Film Classification in Interferometry Eye Images Using Phylogenetic Diversity Indexes and Ripley's K Function

Dry eye syndrome is one of the most frequently reported eye diseases in ophthalmological practice. The diagnosis of this disease is a challenging task due to its multifactorial etiology. One of the most applied tests is the manual classification of tear film images captured with the Doane interferometer. The interference phenomena in these images can be characterized as texture patterns, which can be automatically classified into one of the following categories: strong fringes, coalescing strong fringes, fine fringes, coalescing fine fringes, and debris. This work presents a method for classifying tear film images based on texture analysis using phylogenetic diversity indexes and Ripley's K function. The proposed method consists of six main steps: acquisition of the image dataset; segmentation of the region of interest; feature extraction using phylogenetic diversity indexes and Ripley's K function; feature selection using Greedy Stepwise; classification using the algorithms Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Naive Bayes (NB), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Random Tree (RT) and Radial Basis Function Network (RBFNet); and (6) validation of results. The best result, using the RF classifier, we obtained classification rates higher than 99% of accuracy with 0.843% of standard deviation, 0.999 of the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve, 0.995 of Kappa and 0.996 of F-Measure. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is promising and can potentially be used by experts to accurately diagnose dry eye syndrome in tear film images.