Ridge operator-assisted delineation of capsulorhexis border for cataract surgery.

BACKGROUND

With the continuous development of machine vision and imaging technology and its application in computer-aided diagnosis, it is clinically important to use computer technology to assist physicians in accurate cataract surgery. The capsulorhexis directly affects the outcome of cataract surgery, therefore, we design a method to automatically determine the virtual boundary of capsulorhexis for cataract surgery planning and tracking to help surgeons achieve a more ideal capsulotomy geometry.

METHODS

In this study, an effective method was proposed to detect and display the location of capsulorhexis in cataract videos . The initial step was locating the entire eye area by analyzing the connected components of the mirror reflective points in the image in the cataract surgery video. Then, an operator was designed for ridge edge variation and used to extract pupil edge features. Lastly, circular Hough transform was used to detect the pupillary margin and calculate the boundary between the scleral limbus and the virtual capsulorhexis border in accordance with the pupillary margin and finally displayed it during cataract surgery.

RESULTS

The method was tested on eight videos of cataract surgery and the results showed that 98.52% accuracy was achieved in the localization of the specular reflection point. We compared the proposed operator with the Sobel, Scharr, Laplace and Canny operators and the results showed that our operator achieved the smallest mean square error with the greatest structural similarity.

CONCLUSIONS

The analysis demonstrated that the proposed operator outperformed other operators in detection and achieved satisfactory results in the videos of actual cataract surgeries.