Assessing the effects of riboflavin/UV-A crosslinking on porcine corneal mechanical anisotropy with optical coherence elastography

Manmohan Singh; Jiasong Li; Zhaolong Han; Raksha Raghunathan; Achuth Nair; Chen Wu; Chih-Hao Liu; Salavat Aglyamov; Michael D Twa; Kirill V Larin

doi:10.1364/BOE.8.000349

Assessing the effects of riboflavin/UV-A crosslinking on porcine corneal mechanical anisotropy with optical coherence elastography

Biomed Opt Express. 2016 Dec 19;8(1):349-366. doi: 10.1364/BOE.8.000349. eCollection 2017 Jan 1.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204, USA; Contributed equally to the present work.
² Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204, USA.
³ Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
⁴ School of Optometry, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35233, USA; Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35233, USA.
⁵ Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204, USA; Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Biophotonics, Tomsk State University, Tomsk, Russia; Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030 USA.

Abstract

In this work we utilize optical coherence elastography (OCE) to assess the effects of UV-A/riboflavin corneal collagen crosslinking (CXL) on the mechanical anisotropy of in situ porcine corneas at various intraocular pressures (IOP). There was a distinct meridian of increased Young's modulus in all samples, and the mechanical anisotropy increased as a function of IOP and also after CXL. The presented noncontact OCE technique was able to quantify the Young's modulus and elastic anisotropy of the cornea and their changes as a function of IOP and CXL, opening new avenues of research for evaluating the effects of CXL on corneal biomechanical properties.

Keywords: (170.4460) Ophthalmic optics and devices; (170.4470) Ophthalmology; (170.4500) Optical coherence tomography; (170.6935) Tissue characterization.

Abstract

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