Abstract

Pterygium is an eye condition that causes the fibrovascular tissues to grow towards the corneal region. At the early stage, it is not a harmful condition, except for slight discomfort for the patients. However, it will start to affect the eyesight of the patient once the tissues encroach towards the corneal region, with a more serious impact if it has grown into the pupil region. Therefore, this condition needs to be identified as early as possible to halt its growth, with the use of simple eye drops and sunglasses. One of the associated risk factors for this condition is a low educational level, which explains the reason that the majority of the patients are not aware of this condition. Hence, it is important to develop an automated pterygium screening system based on simple imaging modalities such as a mobile phone camera so that it can be assessed by many people. During the early stage of automated pterygium screening system development, conventional machine learning techniques such as support vector machines and artificial neural networks are the de facto algorithms to detect the presence of pterygium tissues. However, with the arrival of the deep learning era, coupled with the availability of large training data, deep learning networks have replaced the conventional networks in screening for the pterygium condition. The deep learning networks have been successfully implemented for three major purposes, which are to classify an image regarding whether there is the presence of pterygium tissues or not, to localize the lesion tissues through object detection methodology, and to semantically segment the lesion tissues at the pixel level. This review paper summarizes the type, severity, risk factors, and existing state-of-the-art technology in automated pterygium screening systems. A few available datasets are also discussed in this paper for both classification and segmentation tasks. In conclusion, a computer-assisted pterygium screening system will benefit many people all over the world, especially in alerting them to the possibility of having this condition so that preventive actions can be advised at an early stage.

Highlights

  • The abnormal tissues will involve the conjunctiva over the sclera, whereby the disease will encroach towards the corneal region once it becomes more severe

  • For the deep learning-based test, the physical distance variation will not pose a difficult challenge to the classification and segmentation networks as some of the models are embedded with multi-scale capability and, a wider range of physical measurement can be tolerated

  • This paper has summarized the overall state-of-the-art techniques in automated pterygium screening systems, which usually consist of two main tasks: either classification or segmentation

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Summary

Introduction

The abnormal tissues will involve the conjunctiva over the sclera, whereby the disease will encroach towards the corneal region once it becomes more severe. It is a noncancerous or benign type of tissue abnormality that usually has a hedge or kite shape [2].

Pterygium Type and Severity Levels
Pterygium Risk Factors
Pterygium Management and Treatment
Automated Pterygium Detection and Localization
Dataset
Conventional Approach to Automated Pterygium System
Deep Learning Approach to Automated Pterygium System
Findings
Conclusions and Future Works

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