Abstract

The analysis of living ocular tissues at microscopic scale has been a challenge during the last two decades. The development of confocal scanning laser microscopes [1] (CSLM) allowed 3D imaging of the living human cornea at cellular resolution. In vivo CSLM provides visualization of the several corneal structures such as epithelial cells, keratocytes and the endothelium. However, commercially available instruments require non-comfortable eye-contact procedures and the use of immersion media between the living cornea and the microscope objective. However, the healthy cornea is a highly transparent ocular structure and 90% of its thickness corresponds to the stroma, composed of sets of collagen fibers, which can not be imaged with CSLM. In this sense, Second Harmonic Generation microscopy (SHG) is a non-linear auto-confocal technique providing 3D visualization of collagen-based tissues at sub-micron resolution without labeling procedures [2]. To our knowledge SHG imaging microscopy has been not applied in the living human eye yet. Here we proposed a dual-compact imaging system (combining SHG and CSLM) able to imaging the whole living cornea.

© 2017 IEEE