Advances in the Noninvasive Diagnosis of Dry Eye Disease

Dry eye disease (DED) is a multifactorial disease that represents one of the most common ophthalmologic conditions encountered in everyday clinical practice. Traditional diagnostic tests for DED, such as subjective questionnaires, tear film break-up time and the Schirmer test, are often associated with poor reproducibility and reliability, which make the diagnosis, follow-up, and management of the disease challenging. New advances in imaging technologies enable objective and reproducible measurements of DED parameters, thus making the diagnosis a multimodal imaging-based process. The aim of this review is to summarize all the current and emerging diagnostic tools available for the diagnosis and monitoring of DED, such as non-invasive tear breakup time, thermography, anterior segment optical coherence tomography, meibography, interferometry, in vivo confocal microscopy, and optical quality assessment. Although there is not a gold standard imaging technique, new multi-imaging-integrated devices are precious instruments to help clinicians to better cope with the diagnostic complexity of DED.

Automated summary

Dry eye disease is a multifactorial disease that is commonly encountered in clinical practice. Traditional diagnostic tests have limitations, but new imaging technologies offer objective and multimodal approaches. This review summarizes current and emerging diagnostic tools for DED.