Detecting Cataract Using Smartphones.

OBJECTIVE: Cataract, which is the clouding of the crystalline lens, is the most prevalent eye disease accounting for 51% of all eye diseases in the U.S. Cataract is a progressive disease, and its early detection is critical for preventing blindness. In this paper, an efficient approach to identify cataract disease by adopting luminance features using a smartphone is proposed. METHODS: Initially, eye images captured by a smartphone were cropped to extract the lens, and the images were preprocessed to remove irrelevant background and noise by utilizing median filter and watershed transformation. Then, a novel luminance transformation from pixel brightness algorithm was introduced to extract lens image features. The luminance and texture features of different types of cataract disease images could be obtained accurately in this stage. Finally, by adopting support vector machines (SVM) as the classification method, cataract eyes were identified. RESULTS: From all the images that we fed into our system, our method could diagnose diseased eyes with 96.6% accuracy, 93.4% specificity, and 93.75% sensitivity. CONCLUSION: The proposed method provides an affordable, rapid, easy-to-use, and versatile method for detecting cataracts by using smartphones without the use of bulky and expensive imaging devices. This methodcan be used for bedside telemedicine applications or in remote areas that have medical shortages. Previous smartphone-based cataract detection methods include texture feature analysis with 95 % accuracy, Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) method with 89% accuracy, red reflex measurement method, and RGB color feature extraction method using cascade classifier with 90% accuracy. The accuracy of cataract detection in these studies is subject to changes in smartphone models and/or environmental conditions. However, our novel luminance-based method copes with different smartphone camera sensors and chroma variations, while operating independently from sensors' color characteristics and changes in distances and camera angle. Clinical and Translational Impact-This study is an early/pre-clinical research proposing a novel luminance-based method of detecting cataract using smartphones for remote/at-home monitoring and telemedicine application.

Novel Image Processing Method for Detecting Strep Throat (Streptococcal Pharyngitis) Using Smartphone.

In this paper, we propose a novel strep throat detection method using a smartphone with an add-on gadget. Our smartphone-based strep throat detection method is based on the use of camera and flashlight embedded in a smartphone. The proposed algorithm acquires throat image using a smartphone with a gadget, processes the acquired images using color transformation and color correction algorithms, and finally classifies streptococcal pharyngitis (or strep) throat from healthy throat using machine learning techniques. Our developed gadget was designed to minimize the reflection of light entering the camera sensor. The scope of this paper is confined to binary classification between strep and healthy throats. Specifically, we adopted k-fold validation technique for classification, which finds the best decision boundary from training and validation sets and applies the acquired best decision boundary to the test sets. Experimental results show that our proposed detection method detects strep throats with 93.75% accuracy, 88% specificity, and 87.5% sensitivity on average.

Monitoring of Heart Rate from Photoplethysmographic Signals Using a Samsung Galaxy Note8 in Underwater Environments.

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is a commonly used in determining heart rate and oxygen saturation (SpO2). However, PPG measurements and its accuracy are heavily affected by the measurement procedure and environmental factors such as light, temperature, and medium. In this paper, we analyzed the effects of different mediums (water vs. air) and temperature on the PPG signal quality and heart rate estimation. To evaluate the accuracy, we compared our measurement output with a gold-standard PPG device (NeXus-10 MKII). The experimental results show that the average PPG signal amplitude values of the underwater environment decreased considerably (22% decrease) compared to PPG signals of dry environments, and the heart rate measurement deviated 7% (5 beats per minute on average. The experimental results also show that the signal to noise ratio (SNR) and signal amplitude decrease as temperature decreases. Paired t-test which compares amplitude and heart rate values between the underwater and dry environments was performed and the test results show statistically significant differences for both amplitude and heart rate values (p < 0.05). Moreover, experimental results indicate that decreasing the temperature from 45 °C to 5 °C or changing the medium from air to water decreases PPG signal quality, (e.g., PPG signal amplitude decreases from 0.560 to 0.112). The heart rate is estimated within 5.06 bpm deviation at 18 °C in underwater environment, while estimation accuracy decreases as temperature goes down.