A Smart Intraocular Pressure Risk Assessment Framework Using Frontal Eye Image Analysis.

Intraocular pressure (IOP) in general refers to the pressure in the eyes. Gradual increase of IOP and high IOP are conditions/symptoms that may lead to certain diseases such as glaucoma and therefore must be closely monitored. While the pressure in the eye increases, different parts of the eye may become affected until the eye parts are damaged. An effective way to prevent rise in eye pressure is by early detection. A new smart healthcare framework is presented to evaluate the intraocular pressure risk from frontal eye images. The framework monitors the status of IOP risk by analyzing frontal eye images using image processing and machine learning techniques. A database of images collected from Princess Basma Hospital in Jordan was used in this work. The database contains 400 eye images: 200 images with normal IOP and 200 high eye pressure case images. The framework extracts five features from the frontal eye image: the pupil and iris diameter ratio, mean redness level of the sclera, red area percentage of the sclera, and two other features measured from the extracted contour of the sclera (contour height and contour area). Once the features were extracted, a neural network is trained and tested to obtain the status of the patients in terms of eye pressure. The framework detects the status of IOP (normal or high IOP) and produces evidence of the relationship between the five extracted frontal eye image features and IOP, which has not been previously investigated through automated image processing and machine learning techniques using frontal eye images.