Joseph L. Mankowski,Jonathan D. Oakley,Daniel B. Russakoff
申请号：
US15152645
公开号：
US09757022B2
申请日:
2016.05.12
申请国别(地区):
US
年份:
2017
代理人:
摘要：
The present invention is directed to a software algorithm that measures the number of corneal nerve fibers in images captured by microscopy including images from patients obtained by in vivo corneal confocal microscopy, a noninvasive technique. The present invention solves a complicated segmentation problem, by exploiting the piece wise linear nature of the nerve fibers—i.e., the nerves are made up of a lot of straight line segments. The image is split into sub-regions, where each sub-region contains nerves mostly running in the same, straight direction. Having the nerves all in straight-lines within a single 2d image region dramatically simplifies the segmentation problem. The image intensities are summed in the direction of the nerves to reduce the 2d representation to a 1d signal having pronounced peaks where the nerves are located.
