Reliability of a Novel Method to Assess Acute Bacterial Conjunctivitis by Photographs With a Smartphone: A More Reliable Patient-Centred Care

Abstract

Abstract Purpose Acute bacteria conjunctivitis (ABC) is a common disease. As ABC diagnosis is usually based on clinical criteria, the present study aimed at investigating the reliability of photographs performed thorough smart phone.Methods This study was an observational, prospective, inter-method reliability study conducted in three sites in Italy. The patients with ABC enrolled in the study underwent two visits. The signs’ assessment was performed by the Investigators and compared with assessment of photographs’ scores.Results Twenty ABC patients completed the study. Considering the three cardinal signs separately, all the ICCs revealed excellent concordance, being the point estimates ranging between 0.92 and 0.96 and the corresponding 95% CIs totally above 0.75 (i.e., the cut-off of excellent agreement.Conclusions The photographic method's inter-method reliabilities, sensitivity, and specificity were excellent. Therefore, the photographic evaluation of patients suffering from acute bacterial conjunctivitis can allow an accurate follow-up of the evolution of the pathology, which needs to be carried out in clinical practice due to the difficulty of re-evaluating the patient in a clinical setting within a short timeframe. Furthermore, the photographic method could also be usefully employed in clinical trials requiring continuous patient monitoring to compare the speed at which different therapeutic approaches achieve control of disease signs.