In vivo corneal endothelium imaging using ultrahigh resolution OCT

Xinwen Yao; Kavya Devarajan; René M Werkmeister; Valentin Aranha Dos Santos; Marcus Ang; Anthony Kuo; Damon W K Wong; Jacqueline Chua; Bingyao Tan; Veluchamy Amutha Barathi; Leopold Schmetterer

doi:10.1364/BOE.10.005675

In vivo corneal endothelium imaging using ultrahigh resolution OCT

Biomed Opt Express. 2019 Oct 11;10(11):5675-5686. doi: 10.1364/BOE.10.005675. eCollection 2019 Nov 1.

Authors

Xinwen Yao^{1

2

3}, Kavya Devarajan^{1

3}, René M Werkmeister⁴, Valentin Aranha Dos Santos⁴, Marcus Ang^{1

5}, Anthony Kuo^{6

7}, Damon W K Wong^{1

2

8}, Jacqueline Chua^{1

2

5}, Bingyao Tan^{1

2}, Veluchamy Amutha Barathi^{1

5}, Leopold Schmetterer^{1

2

4

9

10}

Affiliations

¹ Singapore Eye Research Institute, Singapore National Eye Centre, Singapore, Singapore.
² SERI-NTU Advanced Ocular Engineering (STANCE), Singapore, Singapore.
³ These authors equally contributed to this work.
⁴ Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
⁵ Academic Clinical Program, Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, Singapore.
⁶ Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
⁷ Department of Ophthalmology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC 27710, USA.
⁸ NTU Institute for Health Technologies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore.
⁹ School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore.
¹⁰ Department of Clinical Pharmacology, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.

Abstract

We investigate the influence of optical coherence tomography (OCT) system resolution on high-quality in vivo en face corneal endothelial cell images of the monkey eye, to allow for quantitative analysis of cell density. We vary the lateral resolution of the ultrahigh resolution (UHR) OCT system (centered at 850 nm) by using different objectives, and the axial resolution by windowing the source spectrum. By suppressing the motion of the animal, we are able to obtain a high-quality en face corneal endothelial cell map in vivo using UHR OCT for the first time with a lateral resolution of 3.1 µm. Increasing lateral resolution did not result in a better image quality but a smaller field of view (FOV), and the axial resolution had little impact on the visualization of corneal endothelial cells. Quantitative analysis of cell density was performed on in vivo en face OCT images of corneal endothelial cells, and the results are in agreement with previously reported data. Our study may offer a practical guideline for designing OCT systems that allow for in vivo corneal endothelial cell imaging with high quality.