  The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has affected several million people.
With the outbreak of the epidemic, many researchers are devoting themselves to
the COVID-19 screening system. The standard practices for rapid risk screening
of COVID-19 are the CT imaging or RT-PCR (real-time polymerase chain reaction).
However, these methods demand professional efforts of the acquisition of CT
images and saliva samples, a certain amount of waiting time, and most
importantly prohibitive examination fee in some countries. Recently, some
literatures have shown that the COVID-19 patients usually accompanied by ocular
manifestations consistent with the conjunctivitis, including conjunctival
hyperemia, chemosis, epiphora, or increased secretions. After more than four
months study, we found that the confirmed cases of COVID-19 present the
consistent ocular pathological symbols; and we propose a new screening method
of analyzing the eye-region images, captured by common CCD and CMOS cameras,
could reliably make a rapid risk screening of COVID-19 with very high accuracy.
We believe a system implementing such an algorithm should assist the triage
management or the clinical diagnosis. To further evaluate our algorithm and
approved by the Ethics Committee of Shanghai public health clinic center of
Fudan University, we conduct a study of analyzing the eye-region images of 303
patients (104 COVID-19, 131 pulmonary, and 68 ocular patients), as well as 136
healthy people. Remarkably, our results of COVID-19 patients in testing set
consistently present similar ocular pathological symbols; and very high testing
results have been achieved in terms of sensitivity and specificity. We hope
this study can be inspiring and helpful for encouraging more researches in this
topic.
