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

我们的目标是制作一套用于计算角膜内皮细胞面积的全自动测量系统，但由于镜面显微镜中每个细胞图像不清晰、对比度低，以及微型计算机处理速度仍然较慢，无法对各种条件下的活体角膜内皮细胞进行实时自动测量。因此，我们开发了一种半自动测量系统，用于测量角膜内皮细胞面积、细胞密度、变异系数和细胞面积的分布，使用镜面显微镜(KONAN)、电视摄像机、包括数字化仪的图像处理单元和微型计算机。该系统从电视摄像机和连接到镜面显微镜的图像处理器获取角膜内皮细胞图像，并利用40个细胞样本与细胞侧面相对的两个中点进行手动数字化。我们将该系统应用于不同大小的内皮细胞的测量，并将数据与传统数字化系统计算的数据进行了比较。这个系统需要2分钟来计算数据。该系统的平均内皮细胞面积误差在10%以内。该系统对了解角膜内皮细胞的形态状况非常有用，可用于临床应用中的内皮细胞镜面显微镜检查。

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.