23/10/2016
Author: Danilo Andrade de Jesús, Wroclaw University of Technology
Cornea is a dynamic tissue which is affected by short and long-term changes such as hypoxia and ageing, respectively. Understanding the dynamics of the corneal biomechanics is of high interest in many fields such as refractive surgery, keratoconus disease, contact lens fitting and glaucoma management. Since there is no standard methodology recognized by all scientific community to infer about corneal biomechanics in-vivo, further studies are necessary. Therefore, in Wroclaw University of Science and Technology in collaboration with University of Manchester, we have explored the potential of corneal speckle by Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) to help us better understanding the corneal biomechanical behaviour. So far we have been studying the effects of ageing, corneal swelling and intraocular pressure on corneal speckle.
Corneal ageing has shown to be significantly correlated with the speckle resulted from OCT imaging. This may be explained by the change of the corneal micro-structure in terms of collagen fibres organization and keratocytes density with ageing. Such changes are reflected on the interaction of the light with corneal tissue and consequently result on different profiles of the intensity histograms which are fitted with probabilistic models. Moreover, our results have shown that corneal biomechanics is influenced by ageing, with younger subjects recovering faster than older subjects from induced corneal swelling. This last work entitled as “A new perspective about the corneal structure based on Optical Coherence Tomography speckle” was presented last august at the 38th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society in Orlando, USA (fig. 1). At the present time, we are exploring the corneal OCT speckle as a new method to correct the intraocular pressure measurements by applanation tonometry.
Figure 1: Poster presentation at the 38th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society in Orlando, USA