Unsupervised Learning Based on Meibography Enables Subtyping of Dry Eye Disease and Reveals Ocular Surface Features

This study aimed to establish an image-based classification that can reveal the clinical characteristics of patients with dry eye using unsupervised learning methods.

In this study, we analyzed 82,236 meibography images from 20,559 subjects. Using the SimCLR neural network, the images were categorized. Data for each patient were averaged and subjected to mini-batch k-means clustering, and validated through consensus clustering. Statistical metrics determined optimal category numbers. Using a UNet model, images were segmented to identify meibomian gland (MG) areas. Clinical features were assessed, including tear breakup time (BUT), tear meniscus height (TMH), and gland atrophy. A thorough ocular surface evaluation was conducted on 280 cooperative patients.

SimCLR neural network achieved clustering patients with dry eye into six image-based subtypes. Patients in different subtypes harbored significantly different noninvasive BUT, significantly correlated with TMH. Subtypes 1 and 5 had the most severe MG atrophy. Subtype 2 had the highest corneal fluorescent staining (CFS). Subtype 4 had the lowest TMH, whereas subtype 5 had the highest. Subtypes 3 and 6 had the largest MG areas, and the upper MG areas of a person's bilateral eyes were highly correlated. Image-based subtypes are related to meibum quality, CFS, and morphological characteristics of MG.

In this study, we developed an unsupervised neural network model to cluster patients with dry eye into image-based subtypes using meibography images. We annotated these subtypes with functional and morphological clinical characteristics.