A computer-aided system for ocular myasthenia gravis diagnosis

Abstract

The current mode of clinical aided diagnosis of Ocular Myasthenia Gravis (OMG) is time-consuming and laborious, and it lacks quantitative standards. An aided diagnostic system for OMG is proposed to solve this problem. The values calculated by the system include three clinical indicators: Eyelid distance, sclera distance, and palpebra superior fatigability test time. For the first two indicators, the semantic segmentation method was used to extract the pathological features of the patient's eye image and a semantic segmentation model was constructed. The patient eye image was divided into three regions: Iris, sclera, and background. The indicators were calculated based on the position of the pixels in the segmentation mask. For the last indicator, a calculation method based on the Eyelid Aspect Ratio (EAR) is proposed; this method can better reflect the change of eyelid distance overtime. The system was evaluated based on the collected patient data. The results show that the segmentation model achieves a mean Intersection-Over-Union (mIoU) value of 86.05%. The paired-sample T-test was used to compare the results obtained by the system and doctors, and the p values were all greater than 0.05. Thus, the system can reduce the cost of clinical diagnosis and has high application value. © 2021 Tsinghua University Press.