Mohd Zulfaezal Che Azemin

International Islamic University Malaysia | iium · Faculty of Allied Health Sciences

Objective: Coffee consumption is a prevalent habit with potential implications for ocular health. This study investigated the short-term effect of caffeine in coffee beverages on healthy subjects’ intraocular pressure (IOP).Material and Methods: Thirty subjects (10 males, 23.40±1.33 years) attended three visits at similar times. During each visit,...

the Arab-OSDI version twice to conduct the reliability of the translated version and repeatability evaluation. Results The mean age of the participants was 33.45 ± 11.74 years old. Cronbach's alpha for all items was greater than 0.80, except for the "blurred vision" and "deteriorating vision" items (0.77 and 0.74, respectively). The mean overall sc...

Background The prevalence of dry eye disease (DED) is rising globally and needs to be urgently addressed by medical professionals because it lowers patients’ quality of life. There are as yet no available data in the literature about the prevalence of and risk factors for DED in the Gaza Strip, a gap that the present study seeks to address. Method...

Intraocular lenses (IOLs) are commonly used to treat ocular diseases such as cataracts. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO 11979) recommends examining IOLs using real model eyes with the lenses in situ, although this process can also be simulated in silico with an accurate IOL haptic design. One way to create this design is by...

Purpose: This study aimed to assess the efficacy of two formulations of lubricant eye drops, containing a gelling agent or not, compared to normal saline. Study Design: This was a prospective, randomized, double-blinded, three-group, parallel, interventional single-site clinical study. Methods: Forty-five Gazan participants with moderate to sever...

Due to pterygium tissue compression on the corneal surface, it has been hypothesised that the degree of corneal astigmatism caused by pterygium can vary. This study aims to develop a freeze-dried method for estimating net pterygium tissue mass (NPTM) as dry weight. A single surgeon (KMK) excised 60 primary pterygium using the controlled partial avu...

Purpose To develop an Arabic version of OSDI for the Gazan population. Methods A cross-sectional observational study was conducted using a convenience sample technique. The translation procedure included five stages: forward translation, revision of translation, backward translation, refinement of translation, and a final test of the pre-final ver...

The robust process in memorising the Quran is expected to cause neuroplasticity changes in the brain. To date, the analysis of neuroplasticity is limited in binary images because greyscale analysis requires the usage of more robust processing techniques. This research work aims to explore and characterise the complexity of textual memorisation brai...

Listening effort is the purposeful allocation of the mental resources used to overcome difficulties when listening to speech in a noisy environment. Increased cognitive load may result in decreased speech perception performance and mental fatigue. Pupillometry can be applied to investigate listening effort where changes in pupil diameter can be mea...

Introduction: Early detection of visual symptoms in pterygium patients is crucial as the progression of the disease can cause visual disruption and contribute to visual impairment. Best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) and corneal astigmatism influence the degree of visual impairment due to direct invasion of fibrovascular tissue into the cornea. Ho...

The main global cause for blindness is due to cataract. The common treatment for cataract is to have the cloudy natural lens to be removed and replace with an artificial intraocular lens (IOL). Success in the post cataract surgery depends on the design and quality of the IOL implanted on the eye. ISO11979-3 is the standard adhered to by many lens m...

Background: Dry eye (DE) is a multifactorial disorder that can influence tear production, functional visual acuity and ultimately increase the osmolarity of the tear film. The prevalence of DE ranges from 7% to 33% across the world. However, to the best of our knowledge, the prevalence range of DE in Arab countries is not precisely documented in...

The key component in deep learning research is the availability of training data sets. With a limited number of publicly available COVID-19 chest X-ray images, the generalization and robustness of deep learning models to detect COVID-19 cases developed based on these images are questionable. We aimed to use thousands of readily available chest radi...

Background: This study aimed to evaluate the pterygium recurrence rate and corneal stabilization point after pterygium excision via the controlled partial avulsion fibrin glue technique using multiple corneal parameters. Methods: One hundred eyes of 100 patients who had undergone primary pterygium excision surgery via the controlled partial avulsi...

Introduction: To propose an objective method of quantifying pterygium fibroconnective components utilizing freeze-dried method. Methods: 60 primary pterygium were excised using controlled partial avulsion technique performed by a single surgeon (KMK), and divided into two groups: formalin-fixed (n=30) and fresh (n=30). Initially, each sterile conta...

Introduction: To propose an objective method of quantifying pterygium thickness using AS-OCT. Methods: Anterior segment imaging was performed using Enhanced High Resolution Corneal (EHRC) of Visante™ OCT in 68 primary pterygium eyes. Prior to imaging, corneal topography assessment was performed on each pterygium eye in order to identify its topogra...

Introduction: To propose an objective method of quantifying pterygium total area utilizing image analysis method. Methods: 68 primary pterygium participants were selected from patients who visited an ophthalmology clinic. We adopted image analysis software in calculating the size of invading pterygium to the cornea. The marking of calculated area w...

Virtual reality (VR) headsets are becoming remarkably well-known nowadays, especially in gaming industry. Their ability to immerse users into virtual world makes them captivating. However, there is limited research about the impacts of this technology on our eyes and vision. This study investigated if there is any effect on blink rate (BR) and inte...

Virtual reality (VR) has been integrated and used with smartphones as one of the digital entertainments such as in gaming and movie streaming. With emergent of various VR brands in the market, it concerns the public on the possible side effects of VR on the ocular performance specifically on tear film stability and ocular discomfort. The purpose of...

Virtual reality (VR) is a fast-growing technology in the world today. Many countries use virtual reality for many purposes such as education, military and entertainment. Despite the benefits of VR, harmful effects of VR on the users are still inconclusive. With only a few reliable studies that investigate the effect of virtual reality on the users...

Pterygium are known to cause reduction in oculovisual function. However, the effects are varying due to its various morphological factors, thus, the impact on patient are difficult to predict which indirectly not all pterygium need to be excised. To describe the effects of different types of pterygium on changes in oculovisual function. Ninety-thre...

Breast cancer is the leading cancer that occurs in women globally. The use of machine learning has been introduced to supplement the work in breast cancer studies. There are undisputed pieces of evidence of the existence of publications pertaining to the use of a decision tree in breast cancer-related research. However, little is known regarding th...

Eye redness can be taken as a sign of inflammation which may suggest severity and progression of a specific disease. In image processing, there is apportioning a digital image into relevant features in sets of pixels where is called image segmentation. The image that consists of numerous parts of different colors and textures need to be distinguish...

Introduction: This paper aimed to describe variation in oculovisual function between unilateral primary pterygium and normal adults using computerized M&S Smart System II. Methods: A total of 120 participants comprise 60 unilateral primary pterygium eyes from 60 pterygium patients and 60 normal adults were recruited in this study. Diagnosis and cla...

Introduction: This paper aimed to determine the corneal stabilization point using corneal topographic approach subsequent to pterygium excision using controlled partial avulsion fibrin glue technique. Methods: Ninety-three eyes of 93 patients who had undergone primary pterygium excision surgery were retrospectively reviewed. Topographic changes, ba...

Introduction: This paper aimed to describe variation in apical corneal curvature between unilateral primary pterygium and normal adults utilizing simulated-K and corneal irregularity measurement corneal indices. Methods: A total of 100 participants comprise 50 unilateral primary pterygium eyes from 50 patients and 50 normal adults were recruited in...

Muslims are concern with the Halal status of food products sold in the supermarkets. Many products that are imported from overseas are not certified by JAKIM. In this paper, we proposed a conceptual model for benchmarking food products against certified Halal products. Our motivation is to provide similarity measurement between certified and non-ce...

Purpose: To describe an objective method to accurately quantify corneo-pterygium total area (CPTA) by utilising image analysis method and to evaluate its association with corneal astigma-tism (CA). Methods: 120 primary pterygium participants were selected from patients who visited an oph-thalmology clinic. We adopted image analysis software in calc...

Background: Contrast sensitivity (CS) is widely used as a measure of visual function in research and clinical settings. CS is regarded as an important visual parameter, detecting subtle reductions in vision prior to significant reduction in visual acuity. Methods: We examined the agreement between the gold-standard Pelli-Robson chart and a computer...

Introduction: As various pterygium morphologies have been advocated as contributing factor on corneal astigmatism, little support in the literature available in establishing techniques in measuring pterygium thickness as clinical indicator.Objective: The aim of this study was to describe a quantitative method in determining pterygium thickness usin...

Introduction: Corneal curvature (CC) is an important anterior segment parameter. This study compared CC measurements conducted with two optical devices in pterygium eyes. Methods: Sixty pterygium eyes of 30 patients were enrolled in this study. CC was measured three times with the optical biometer and topography-keratometer Tomey OA-2000 (Tomey Cor...

Introduction: Corneal curvature (CC) is an important anterior segment parameter. This study compared CC measurements conducted with two optical devices in pterygium eyes. Methods: Sixty pterygium eyes of 30 patients were enrolled in this study. CC was measured three times with the optical biometer and topography-keratometer Tomey OA-2000 (Tomey Co...

Background: To determine the prevalence of dry eye disease (DED) at Jalan Hospital Eye Care, International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), Kuantan, Malaysia. Methods: The dry eye symptoms and tear breakup time test (TBUT) values retrieved from the medical records of 643 patients were retrospectively analysed. Dry eye cases with one or more symp...

Introduction: The brain is the most complex organ in the human body. Robust and vigorous daily activities may cause changes to the brain structure. Huffaz, individuals who memorise the Quran undergo intensive memorization training which may lead to structural changes in specific regions of the brain. Materials and method: This study looked at possi...

Purpose: The goal of this study was to predict visual acuity (VA) and contrast sensitivity function (CSF) with tissue redness grading after pterygium surgery. Materials and methods: A total of 67 primary pterygium participants were selected from patients who visited an ophthalmology clinic. We developed a semi-automated computer program to measure...

Textual memorization involves intensive memorization techniques and processes, including repetition, rehearsal, and retrieval. Yet, little is known about the possible effects of this robust memorization training on brain structures. Therefore, this study was designed to investigate the presence of structural plasticity in the brain, which may devel...

This research work outlines the methodology of a medical image grading system based on supervised learning algorithm. A total of 210 features were extracted in various color spaces and most relevant features were identified and fed into a regularized feedforward neural network. The inter-grader reliability of the supervised system was then assessed...

This research work investigates the influences of FD algorithm variation on the measurement of retinal vasculature complexity. Forty retinal vasculature images from publicly available dataset were subjected to four variations of box-counting FD algorithm. Different positions of box-grid were found to significantly affect the measurement of FD (p <...

In the absence of ground truth, scores from many graders are required to obtain good representation of a clinical grading. The internet enables quick feedback from the experts at the comfort of their home or office. In this study, we demonstrated the use of online form as a tool to get quick feedback from clinicians on clinical grading of pterygium...

The goal of this study was to provide the empirical evidence of fractal dimension as an indirect measure of retinal vasculature density. Two hundred retinal samples of right eye [57.0% females (n = 114) and 43.0% males (n = 86)] were selected from baseline visit. A custom-written software was used for vessel segmentation. Vessel segmentation is the...

Contrast Detail phantom is a quality control tool to analyze the performance of imaging devices. Currently, its function is solely to evaluate the contrast detail characteristic of imaging system. It consists of drilled hole which gives effect to the penetration of x-ray beam divergence to pass through the base of each hole. This effect will lead t...

Fractal dimensions (FDs) are frequently used for summarizing the complexity of retinal vascular. However, previous techniques on this topic were not zone specific. A new methodology to measure FD of a specific zone in retinal images has been developed and tested as a marker for stroke prediction. Higuchi's fractal dimension was measured in circumfe...

Objective: The aim of this study was to compare the retinal vasculature complexity between emmetropia, and myopia in younger subjects. Methods: A total of 82 patients (24.12 ± 1.25 years) with two types of refractive conditions, myopia and emmetropia were enrolled in this study. Refraction data were converted to spherical equivalent refraction....

Contrast Detail phantom is used to evaluate the Contrast Detail performance of imaging system. The wall of drilled hole in commercial Contrast Detail phantom will give effect to the penetration of x-ray beam divergence to pass through the base of each hole. This effect will lead to false appearance of image but it does not visualised in the radiogr...

Current state-of-the art supervised vessel segmentation methods require large number of feature vectors to construct a good model. In this paper, we propose a framework to optimally search for optimal features as inputs to Artificial Neural Network (ANN) trained by Scaled Conjugate Gradient (SCG). SCG is known to speed-up the learning stage in a su...

The fractal dimension is a global measure of complexity and is useful for quantifying anatomical structures, including the retinal vascular network. A previous study found a linear declining trend with aging on the retinal vascular fractal dimension (DF); however, it was limited to the older population (49 years and older). This study aimed to inve...

Pulsatile changes in retinal vascular geometry over the cardiac cycle have clinical implication for diagnosis of ocular and systemic vascular diseases. In this study, we report a Vesselness Mapping of Retinal Image Sequence (VMRS) methodology to visualize the vessel pulsation and quantify the pulsatile motions in the cardiac cycle. Retinal images w...

Retina biometric has applications on high security access control systems. The interference of lighting and deformation of viewpoint in the retina image acquisition have impact on the process of retina feature extraction and matching. In this paper, we propose a method using color histogram as the trait of retina biometric. The color histogram has...

Our previous study found the retinal vessel diameter measurement using summary formula has no significant difference for the multiple retinal images of the same person, while the individual vessel measures show the significant difference. It was speculated that the revised formula summarizing the individual measures and therefore against variation....

Video analysis of the dynamics of the tear meniscus height (TMH) have been used in the diagnosis of dry eye. However, the existing techniques require substantial manual intervention. This research work aims to automate the process of estimating the change in the inferior TMH without manual intervention.

To obtain precise calibre measurements, there are two general approaches: segment the vessels and measure the diameter, and to measure the diameter from the greyscale images. While there is a claim that vessel segmentation does not solve diameter measurement problems it has not been proven experimentally. The aim of this work is two-fold: first, to...

Purpose: Changes in retinal vascular parameters have been shown to be associated with systemic vascular diseases. In this study, we assessed the physiologic variations in retinal vascular measurements during the cardiac cycle. Methods: Fundus images were taken using electrocardiogram-synchronized retinal camera at nine distinct cardiac points fr...

Previous work suggests a general reduction in complexity with aging, referred to as the aging-complexity theory. Fractal dimension (FD) of the vessels in the retina is a global measure of the complexity of the vasculature. However, earlier works did not find any correlation between aging and FD of the retinal vasculature, in contrast to the finding...

Study of retinal blood vessel features, especially the caliber, has been widely used for risk level assessment of certain disease conditions. In this work a vessel diameter measurement technique based on Gaussian modeling has been proposed. This method adaptively combines a series of second and higher order Gaussians to model the vessel profile and...

Cardiac variation has a great impact on retinal vessel calibers, but it has been ignored in previous retinal caliber related studies. This is assuming that retinal vessel calibers follows normal distribution with random photography and measurement, while it didn't consider the cardiac variation and no evidences have proved it to date. This research...

The current instantaneous retinal photography method has large variations in the retinal vessel diameter measurement due to retinal vessel pulsation which has been reported associated to the cardiac cycle. The previous limited studies show limitation on their methodologies. To better understand and analyze the variation in the cardiac cycle, we dev...

Caliber of the retinal blood vessel is widely used for risk assessment of cardiovascular diseases. Accurate and automatic caliber measurement requires a precise model to be made for the vessel profile. In this paper, we present a new approach for retinal vessel profiling in which the background noise, uneven illuminations and specular reflections h...

Retinal image has been considered for number of health and biometrics applications. However, the reliability of these has not been investigated thoroughly. The variation observed in retina scans taken at different times is attributable to differences in illumination and positioning of the camera. It causes some missing bifurcations and crossovers f...

Recent studies show associations between retinal vascular changes and small infarcts detected on brain imaging, or clinical stroke. Fractal dimension has been used as a global measure of the geometric pattern of the retinal vasculature potentially representing the complex branching pattern of the microvasculature, including the cerebral microvascul...

We have developed a new method to measure and compare individual vessel diameters at the same location across multiple images of the same subject. This computer assisted semi-automated measurement includes some novel techniques, such as three-point optic disk identification, homocentric orientation and color mapping vessel edge detection. This meth...

We have developed a robust method to perform retinal vascular fractal analysis from digital retina images. The technique preprocesses the green channel retina images with Gabor wavelet transforms to enhance the retinal images. Fourier Fractal dimension is computed on these preprocessed images and does not require any segmentation of the vessels. Th...

We have developed a methodology to estimate small change in the retinal vessel diameter. This technique does not rely on the segmentation of the vessel which is prone to error when the fitted profile does not exactly represent the expected model. Using the newly proposed method, we have identified an inverse linear relationship (p<0.0001, r2 = 0.96...

This paper presents a lip reading technique to classify the discrete utterances without evaluating the acoustic signals. The reported technique analysis the video data of lip motions by computing the optical flow (OF). The statistical properties of the vertical OF component were used to form the feature vectors for training the support vector machi...

In this paper, we present a novel method of analyzing retinal vasculature using Fourier Fractal Dimension to extract the complexity of the retinal vasculature enhanced at different wavelet scales. Logistic regression was used as a fusion method to model the classifier for 5-year stroke prediction. The efficacy of this technique has been tested usin...

Medical images enhanced at different scales have shown to give good results in mammogram enhancement, tumor classification, and lung nodule detection. However, the studies of multiscale analysis on retinal vasculature have been primarily limited to vessel segmentation. We propose using the Fourier Fractal dimension (FFD) to extract the complexity o...

The technique used in the only commercially available system for retinal biometrics is based on encoding the vessel structure surrounding the optic disc. However, it has been reported that this technique has low inter-personal variability, making it unsuitable for identifying an individual from a large database. In this paper we propose a new techn...