Imaging of Keratoconic and normal human cornea with a Brillouin imaging system (Conference Presentation)

Abstract

Keratoconus is a degenerative disorder of the eye characterized by human cornea thinning and morphological change to a more conical shape. Current diagnosis of this disease relies on topographic imaging of the cornea. Early and differential diagnosis is difficult. In keratoconus, mechanical properties are found to be compromised. A clinically available invasive technique capable of measuring the mechanical properties of the cornea is of significant importance for understanding the mechanism of keratoconus development and improve detection and intervention in keratoconus. The capability of Brillouin imaging to detect local longitudinal modulus in human cornea has been demonstrated previously. We report our non-contact, non-invasive, clinically viable Brillouin imaging system engineered to evaluate mechanical properties human cornea in vivo. The system takes advantage of a highly dispersive 2-stage virtually imaged phased array (VIPA) to detect weak Brillouin scattering signal from biological samples. With a 1.5-mW light beam from a 780-nm single-wavelength laser source, the system is able to detect Brillouin frequency shift of a single point in human cornea less than 0.3 second, at a 5μm/30μm lateral/axial resolution. Sensitivity of the system was quantified to be ~ 10 MHz. A-scans at different sample locations on a human cornea with a motorized human interface. We imaged both normal and keratoconic human corneas with this system. Whereas no significantly difference were observed outside keratocnic cones compared with normal cornea, a highly statistically significantly decrease was found in the cone regions.