Polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) has been developed to measure the birefringent properties of the human eye. In the retina, retinal nerve fiber layer and retinal pigment epitherial layer have the characteristic birefringent properties.^1.2 In addition to such normal tissue, abnormal fibrous tissue of the retina can be detected by PS-OCT.³ In the anterior segment, the cornea is a birefringent tissue due to the multi-layered fibril structure.⁴ The sclera and tendon also have the birefringence and the contrast of these structures can be enhanced by PS-OCT.⁵ These studies have been used time-domain or spectral-domain PS-OCT. Recently, swept-source OCT (SS-OCT) has been applied for anterior eye segment imaging.⁶ At the 1.3 um wavelength, SS-OCT is more promising than spectral-domain OCT, because the available camera for the spectrometer is limited. Three-dimensional imaging of the anterior segment is possible owing to the high penetration, high acquisition speed and high sensitivity. We have developed a new system of SS-OCT with polarization sensitivity. In this study, we measure the birefringent properties of anterior eye segment by polarization-sensitive spectral-domain OCT (PS-SD-OCT) at 840 nm and polarizationsensitive swept-source OCT (PS-SS-OCT) at 1.3 um, and evaluated the possibilities for clinical application.

Date Published: 25 February 2008
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 6844, Ophthalmic Technologies XVIII, 68441C (25 February 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.761590

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6844:
Ophthalmic Technologies XVIII
Bruce E. Stuck; Fabrice Manns; Per G. Söderberg; Michael Belkin M.D.; Arthur Ho, Editor(s)