الفهرس 
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Abstract
It is difficult to standardize assessment of dry eye in different clinical settings. Increasingly, tear stability is recognized to be important for the definition and assessment of patients with dry eye.
Fluorescein Tear Breakup Time FBUT is the most frequently used diagnostic test to determine tear film instability. However, significant downfalls of the measurement of FBUT include its invasiveness, its dependence on subjective assessment by the observer and the lack of a standardized procedure for applying fluorescein to the tear film.
Given the lack of reproducibility of FBUT, other “non-invasive” techniques have been reported. In this study we used the CSO Sirius topographer for assessment of NIBUT and tear film surface quality.
The aim of our study is to evaluate an automated objective novel method for measuring tear film breakup time, and to investigate if and to what extent its results differ from those obtained by the conventional subjective Fluorescein method.
In our study, we found that there is high agreement between the average non-invasive tear breakup time NI-AvgBUT using the CSO Sirius topographer and the FTBUT (p<0.001) with NI-AvgBUT values being slightly longer than those of the FTBUT.
The study proves that Non-invasive tear breakup time NIBUT using the CSO Sirius topographer provides a more reliable and accurate means of tear film surface quality assessment than that provided by the conventional invasive FBUT method. It also provides a reliable means of follow up for dry eye patients to assess the efficacy of their treatment regimens.