Artificial intelligence to automate assessment of ocular and periocular measurements

To develop and validate a deep learning facial landmark detection network to automate the assessment of periocular anthropometric measurements.

Patients presenting to the ophthalmology clinic were prospectively enrolled and had their images taken using a standardised protocol. Facial landmarks were segmented on the images to enable calculation of marginal reflex distance (MRD) 1 and 2, palpebral fissure height (PFH), inner intercanthal distance (IICD), outer intercanthal distance (OICD), interpupillary distance (IPD) and horizontal palpebral aperture (HPA). These manual segmentations were used to train a machine learning algorithm to automatically detect facial landmarks and calculate these measurements. The main outcomes were the mean absolute error and intraclass correlation coefficient.

A total of 958 eyes from 479 participants were included. The testing set consisted of 290 eyes from 145 patients. The AI algorithm demonstrated close agreement with human measurements, with mean absolute errors ranging from 0.22 mm for IPD to 0.88 mm for IICD. The intraclass correlation coefficients indicated excellent reliability (ICC > 0.90) for MRD1, MRD2, PFH, OICD, IICD, and IPD, while HPA showed good reliability (ICC 0.84). The landmark detection model was highly accurate and achieved a mean error rate of 0.51% and failure rate at 0.1 of 0%.

The automated facial landmark detection network provided accurate and reliable periocular measurements. This may help increase the objectivity of periocular measurements in the clinic and may facilitate remote assessment of patients with tele-health.