Dried-tear classifier · keepsake portrait · AFM microscopy

Keep your tears of joy forever.

Our model reads dried-tear microscopy to distinguish five chronic diseases. The same scan can also become a porcelain-glass keepsake: a way to hold on to a tear of joy forever.

Commission a portrait Read the science
Classification report Research paper (PDF)
The science

Five classes.
One drop.

When a tear dries on glass, it forms branching crystal patterns. Those patterns change with the body's chemistry. Our model learns to distinguish five classes from a single AFM scan.

I
AFM scan of a healthy dried tear
Healthy
baseline

Even branching, soft radial symmetry, clean edges.

II
AFM scan of a dried tear from a diabetic patient
Diabetes
mellitus

Dense dendritic cores, thickened primary branches.

III
AFM scan of a dried tear from a glaucoma patient
Glaucoma
ocular pressure

Sparse fibrillar lines, broken secondary branching.

IV
AFM scan of a dried tear from a multiple sclerosis patient
Multiple
sclerosis

Disrupted symmetry, irregular crystalline islands.

V
AFM scan of a dried tear from a dry-eye patient
Dry eye
syndrome

Shortened ferns, coarse lipid aggregates, low coverage.

Model

EfficientNetV2-S

21M parameters, ImageNet-pretrained, fine-tuned at 384 × 384. AdamW with a cosine schedule, MixUp and CutMix, class-weighted loss for the 7:1 imbalance between MS and dry eye.

Evaluation

macro F1

Patient-stratified 80/20 split — 189 scans from 33 patients for training, 51 scans from 9 unseen patients held out. No patient appears on both sides.

Pipeline

AFM → tensor

A fixed 523 × 531 crop removes the scale bar. Each scan is re-rendered through viridis, plasma, inferno, magma, cividis and grayscale to decouple color from topography.

Headline numbers

What the model actually does.

Performance falls as the question gets finer. Sick-or-healthy is almost solved; naming one disease out of five is still hard. We report the honest numbers, not the flattering ones.

  • Binary
    94.1%
    f1-macro

    Healthy vs. disease. Clear margin, stable across folds.

  • Three-class
    82.4%
    f1-macro

    Healthy · autoimmune · metabolic. The useful clinical split.

  • Five-class
    64.7%
    f1-macro

    Full diagnosis from a single tear. Where the frontier is.

All numbers are f1-macro on a patient-stratified split — no patient appears on both sides of training and evaluation. One drop, one story, one honest score.

Extraction kit — labeled sample vial, petri dish, dropper, tweezers, pH strip on a white lab surface
Pl. III Extraction kit · in situ
Feasibility · one-time test

A home kit
you can cry into.

Cry at home, mail the sample, get your memory imprint back. The tear survives the journey — we checked.

  1. 01

    Biologically stable in transit

    Scientists at UPJŠ confirmed the tear's crystalline signature holds between collection and the microscope.

  2. 02

    Resistant to heat and transport

    The dried drop tolerates ambient shipping without losing the dendritic structure the model needs to read it.

  3. 03

    Cry → mail → imprint

    One vial, one petri dish, one dropper, one pH strip. The rest happens in the lab and on the substrate you keep.

The range

From the lab,
onto the shelf.

Once a tear becomes a pattern, it can become an object.

Crystal plaquette etched with a dendritic tear pattern, standing on a desk

Plaquette
crystal, hand-polished.

One scan, laser-etched into a polished tile of optical crystal, about the size of a small book. Part keepsake, part portrait, meant to last.

Porcelain plate with a dendritic tear motif under the glaze

Porcelain plate
10-inch dinner.

A 10-inch dinner plate, dendritic tear motif applied under a clear glaze. Oven, dishwasher, and years of Sunday lunches safe.

Laptop lid laser-etched with a dendritic tear pattern in matte finish

Laptop cover
anodised aluminium.

Your tear, laser-engraved into a matte aluminium shell that fits your laptop. The pattern only reveals itself when the light catches the bevel.

Monster Zero Ultra can wrapped with a dendritic tear pattern

Monster can
24 cans. Never for sale.

Printed with the tear our ML team cried at 4am. One crate only, Hack Košice 2026. It is, and is not, a real product — a fair question what this says about the studio, which we refuse to answer.