Please join us on Friday at 3 via ZOOM to hear Toby Driscoll speak on...
Analysis of tear-film breakup using in vivo fluorescence video recordings
please contact one of the colloquium coordinators (Kristen Rowland -- rowlandke -- or Nadun Dissanayake -- nadunkul) for zoom information.
Abstract: The tear film in a human eye protects the cornea, but millions have poorly functioning films that rupture quickly, causing discomfort and potentially resulting in long-term tissue damage. While mechanisms behind tear film breakup (TBU) are now fairly well understood, reliable and repeatable clinical identification of responsible mechanisms for an individual has remained elusive. Videos of tear film fluorescence were captured for 25 normal subjects. A deep convolutional neural network was trained to identify likely instances of TBU. Each instance was sampled to create a time series of fluorescent intensity, and fitting these results to a suite of ODE models led to approximate solutions for the film thickness and osmolarity (saltiness). Optimum parameter values within the ODEs suggest the relative strengths of underlying mechanisms, which can vary by individual subject and even for different regions over the cornea within a single trial.
About the Speaker: Toby Driscoll is a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Delaware. His research interests are in scientific computation, mathematical software, and applications of mathematics in the life sciences. He is the head of the Center for Applications of Mathematics in Medicine at UD. (from personal website)