Fully automated blink detection for uveal melanoma radiotherapy

Uveal melanoma is a widespread neoplasm in the eye that cause vision defects. The disease may result in loss of eye, even loss of life with a risk of metastasis to other tissues. There have been proposed various treatment methods to overcome the disease including enucleation and radiotherapy. Radiotherapy treatment is certainly preferable since it avoids the loss of eye. The treatment is applied with radioactive beam directed to the tumor, and thus the eye must be kept steady usually with local anesthesia. However, anesthesia has many health risks; therefore it is preferable to perform this operation without it. This paper presents an approach where a camera will be recording the eye and the radiotherapy will immediately be halted when the eye is closed to avoid unnecessary beams directed to healthy regions of the eye. System is based on the classification of the acquired image frames as “eye open” and “eye closed”. The speed of the algorithm is aimed as close as possible to real time so that it can respond instantly to any change in present eye state. A total of 480 video frames, 120 frames for each open and closed eyes in bright and dark lighting conditions separately, were used for experimentation. Test results indicate that developed features are successful in terms of being very fast providing no classification error.