Quantification of sun-related changes in the eye in conjunctival ultraviolet autofluorescence images

Quantification of sun-related changes in conjunctival ultraviolet autofluorescence (CUVAF) images is a subjective and tedious task, in which reproducibility of results is difficult. Thus, we have developed a semiautomatic method in MATLAB (R) to analyze CUVAF images retrospectively. The algorithm was validated on 200 images from 50 randomly selected participants from the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort (Raine) study 20-year follow-up assessment, in which CUVAF area measurements were available from previous manual analysis. Algorithm performance was compared to manual measurements and yielded better than 95% correspondence in both intra-and interobserver agreement. Furthermore, the semiautomatic method significantly reduced analysis time by 50%. (C) 2016 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)