Assessing the microstructures of the human cornea using Gabor-Domain optical coherence microscopy with large field of view and high resolution
Abstract
Purpose
To investigate the performances of a new large field of view and high volumetric-resolution Gabor-Domain Optical Coherence Microscope (GD-OCM) in imaging human corneal microstructures
Methods
The GD-OCM combined the high sectioning capability of optical coherence tomography with the high lateral resolution of confocal microscopy. We developed a system that achieved high-contrast imaging with a field of view of 1 ± 1 mm2 and volumetric cellular resolution of 2 μm across a thickness of up to 2 mm in tissue. The system fitted on a movable cart and the handheld scanning probe was attached to an articulated arm that may be adjusted to image different locations of the cornea without contact. For real time visualization, we implemented a parallelized Multi-Graphic Processing Units architecture to speed up the processing of data. In this investigation, we focused on imaging the microanatomy of the corneal stroma keratocytes as well as corneal endothelial cells of ex vivo human corneas maintained in an innovative bioreactor
Results
The overall time to 3D visualization, including acquisition that is 1.5 minutes, processing and rendering of a 1000 × 1000 × 400 voxels, was <2 minutes compared to 2 hours on a conventional CPU. The system produced 3D high-resolution images of the distribution of epithelial cells, stromal keratocytes and endothelial cells, comparable to standard in vivo confocal microscopy
Conclusions
This innovative GD-OCM allows pseudo histology of the cornea in an unprecedented wide field and a short acquisition time compatible with analysis of ex vivo living corneas
