Comparative study on fractal analysis of interferometry images with application to tear film surface quality assessment

The purpose of this research was to evaluate the applicability of the fractal dimension (FD) estimators to assess lateral shearing interferometric (LSI) measurements of tear film surface quality. Retrospective recordings of tear film measured with LSI were used: 69 from healthy subjects and 41 from patients diagnosed with dry eye syndrome. Five surface quality descriptors were considered, four based on FD and a previously reported descriptor operating in a spatial frequency domain (M-2), presenting temporal kinetics of post-blink tear film. A set of 12 regression parameters has been extracted and analyzed for classification purposes. The classifiers are assessed in terms of receiver operating characteristics and areas under their curves (AUC). Also, the computational loads are estimated. The maximum AUC of 82.4% was achieved for M-2, closely followed by the binary box-counting (BBC) FD estimator with AUC = 78.6%. For all descriptors, statistically significant differences between the subject groups were found (p < 0.05). The BBC FD estimator was characterized with the highest empirical computational efficiency that was about 30% faster than that of M-2, while that based on the differential box-counting exhibited the lowest efficiency (4.5 times slower than the best one). Concluding, FD estimators can be utilized for quantitative assessment of tear film kinetics. They provide a viable alternative to previously used spectral counter parameters, and at the same time allow higher computational efficiency. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America