NeuroCornea — Diabetic peripheral neuropathy early diagnosis and follow-up through in vivo automatic analysis of corneal nerves morphology

Abstract

Peripheral diabetic neuropathy is the major cause of chronic disability in diabetic patients. The early diagnosis and accurate assessment of peripheral neuropathy are important to define the higher risk patients, decrease patient morbidity and assess the performance of new therapies. However, the peripheral neuropathy diagnosis often fails or occurs only when patients became symptomatic due to the non-availability of a simple non-invasive method for early diagnosis. Corneal confocal microscopy is a non-invasive imaging modality that can document corneal nerves morphology. In this project, we will develop a technique for early diagnosis of diabetic neuropathy based on automatic analysis of corneal nerves images. This project comprises the development of automatic algorithms for nerve segmentation and morphometric parameters extraction, the evaluation of the best parameters for early diagnosis and follow-up of diabetic neuropathy and the development of a corneal confocal imaging module to be used as an add-on to a standard slit-lamp.