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Novel Hybrid Teleophthalmology: Technological Case for Oculofacial Surgery

Telemedicine has emerged as a promising mode of healthcare delivery, especially, in remote areas. In this regard, healthcare providers often follow a multi-tier pyramidal model. Typically, at the bottom of the pyramid are the primary health-care centers, located in remote areas, which offer basic imaging and recording of vital signals, as well as preliminary diagnosis and treatment. The higher layers of the pyramid consist of secondary and tertiary centers, which provide advanced diagnosis, treatment, surgical care as well as research. In this paper, we focus on teleophthalmology and propose to enhance it by integrating a 3D imaging system into existing multi-tier eyecare. In particular, we present a patient-friendly multiple-camera-based system for facial image acquisition and 3D reconstruction. The proposed system is built using off-the-shelf components, and is easy-to-operate with minimal training. Consequently, our system is suitable for deployment in the primary or secondary healthcare centers. Importantly, it allows the flexibility of performing imaging at a primary healthcare center, and the tasks of 3D reconstruction, visualization and quantification at the tertiary center. Indeed, we envisage a novel hybrid teleopthalmology framework, where diagnosis and various pre-operative steps as well as post-operative followups can remotely be performed on the patient, while s/he needs to undertake significant travel only for the actual surgery. Such eyecare framework is expected to lower the cost and other burdens on remotely located subjects. In emergency situations such as facial trauma, our framework could be particularly effective in reducing the time (and cost) of oculofacial procedures. As a step towards realizing the proposed system, in this paper we present preliminary results of 3D face reconstruction and discuss teleophthalmological implications.