Determining variability of ophthalmic arterial Doppler signals using Lyapunov exponents.

The new method presented in this study was directly based on the consideration that ophthalmic arterial Doppler signals are chaotic signals. This consideration was tested successfully using the nonlinear dynamics tools, like the computation of Lyapunov exponents. Multilayer perceptron neural network (MLPNN) architecture was formulated and used as a basis for determining variabilities such as stenosis, ocular Behcet disease, and uveitis disease in the physical state of ophthalmic arterial Doppler signals. The computed Lyapunov exponents of the ophthalmic arterial Doppler signals were used as inputs of the MLPNN. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to assess the performance of the detection process. The ophthalmic arterial Doppler signals were classified with the accuracy varying from 93.75% to 97.06%. The results confirmed that the proposed MLPNN trained with Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm has potential in detecting stenosis, Behcet disease and uveitis disease in ophthalmic arteries.