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 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. 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.