Full-automatic measurement system for the corneal endothelial cell morphology in vivo

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We aimed to make the full-automatic measurement system for computation of the corneal endothelial cell area, but we had difficulties that it was impossible to measure the corneal endothelial cells in vivo in various conditions in real time automatically because the each cell image in the specular microscope was not sharp and had a low contrast, and the proceessing speed of a microcomputer was still slow. Therefore, we developed a semi-automatic system for measurement of the corneal endothelial cell area, cell density, coefficient of variation, and distribution of cell area using a specular microscope (Konan), a TV camera, an image processing unit including a digitizer, and a microcomputer. In this system, the corneal endothelial cell image was obtained from the TV camera and the image processor connected to the specular microscope, and were digitized manually using 2 midpoints of confronting cell sides of 40 cell sample. We applied this system to measurement of various sizes of the endothelial cells and data was compared with those which had been computed by the conventional digitizing system. This system required 2 minutes to compute the data. The error of mean endothelial cell area in this system was within 10%. This system in this specifications was very useful to know the status of the corneal endothelial cell morphology, and could be used in specular microscopy of the endothelial cells in clinical practice.