Breakthrough imaging technique offers non-invasive early detection of corneal diseases
Waterloo Physics and Astronomy’s Prof. Bizheva leads a research group hoping to change this and allow doctors to detect and treat corneal diseases early, before the cloudy veil of late-stage degeneration robs patients of their vision. In a recent paper published in Biomedical Optics Express (full citation below), they demonstrate a huge step toward this goal. They have developed an optical imaging modality that can image a large volume of the cornea in three dimensions with enough resolution to see individual cells. The technology is very fast (it acquires 1 volumetric image in a quarter of a second) and the procedure is completely non-contact (the imaging probe does not touch the eye’s surface, or do anything else that might make your skin crawl). The publication that described the imaging system and what it can do, was the most downloaded paper in the Biomedical Optics Express journal for the year 2022.
The paper Line-scanning SD-OCT for in-vivo non-contact, volumetric, cellular resolution imaging of the human cornea and limbus was published in Biomedical Optics Express, volume 13, pages 4007-4020 in 2022 [https://doi.org/10.1364/BOE.465916]. The authors were Le Han, a PhD student who built the system and conducted the measurements, Bingyao Tan, a former PhD student now a research associate at Nanyang Technological University, Zohreh Hosseinaee, a former PhD student now a post-doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, an MSc student who now works on similar topics in industry, Denise Hileeto, an Associate Prof. at the UW School of Optometry and Vision Sciences, and Kostadinka Bizheva, professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo. The research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Transformative Quantum Technologies program of the Canada First Research Excellence Fund.
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