Abstract
To establish complementary information for the diagnosis and evaluation of ocular surface diseases, we developed a multi-modal, non-invasive optical imaging platform by combining ultra-high resolution optical coherence tomography (UHR-OCT) with a microvascular imaging system based on slit-lamp biomicroscopy. Our customized UHR-OCT module achieves an axial resolution of ≈2.9 μm in corneal tissue with a broadband light source and an A-line acquisition rate of 24 kHz with a line array CCD camera. The microvascular imaging module has a lateral resolution of 3.5 μm under maximum magnification of ≈187.5× with an imaging rate of 60 frames/s, which is sufficient to image the conjunctival vessel network and record the movement trajectory of clusters of red blood cells. By combining the imaging optical paths of different modules, our customized multi-modal anterior eye imaging platform is capable of performing real-time cross-sectional UHR-OCT imaging of the anterior eye, conjunctival vessel network imaging, high-resolution conjunctival blood flow videography, fluorescein staining and traditional slit-lamp imaging on a single device. With self-developed software, a conjunctival vessel network image and blood flow videography were further analyzed to acquire quantitative morphological and hemodynamics parameters, including vessel fractal dimensions, blood flow velocity and vessel diameters. The ability of our multi-modal anterior eye imager to provide both structural and functional information for ophthalmic clinical applications was demonstrated on a healthy human subject and a keratitis patient.
Highlights
The ocular surface is susceptible to infection, inflammation, trauma and other ocular surface diseases that strongly affect people’s health and quality of life [1,2,3]
We developed a multi-modal non-invasive anterior eye imaging platform by combining our customized ultra-high resolution optical coherence tomography (UHR-optical coherence tomography (OCT)) and microvascular imaging system based on a functional slit-lamp biomicroscopy to provide both structural and functional information in ophthalmic clinical practice
An axial resolution of ≈ 2.9 μm in corneal tissue was achieved by the UHR-OCT module for high-resolution corneal structure imaging
Summary
The ocular surface is susceptible to infection, inflammation, trauma and other ocular surface diseases that strongly affect people’s health and quality of life [1,2,3]. Various clinical symptoms may exist for most of the ocular surface diseases. Mainly caused by the inflammation of the cornea, keratitis typically manifests as a defect of the corneal epithelium and even stromal infiltration, which could cause conjunctival vessel dilation, distortion and congestion, and even lead to abnormal blood vessel growth [4,5,6]. Sci. 2020, 10, 2545 evaluation of ocular surface diseases, different imaging modalities are usually applied in ophthalmic clinics to provide multi-modal and multi-dimensional images [7,8]
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