Wartak Andreas, Schenk Merle S, Bühler Verena, Kassumeh Stefan A, Birngruber Reginald, Tearney Guillermo J
Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114, USA.
Department of Dermatology, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
Biomed Opt Express. 2020 Sep 28;11(10):5920-5933. doi: 10.1364/BOE.402971. eCollection 2020 Oct 1.
We demonstrate the highest resolution (1.5×1.5×1 µm) micrometer optical coherence tomography (µOCT) imaging of the morphologic micro-structure of excised swine and non-human primate corneas. Besides epithelial, stromal, and endothelial cell morphology, this report focuses on investigating the most peripheral corneal nerve fibers, the nerve fibers of the subbasal plexus (SBP). Alterations of SBP nerve density and composition are reportedly linked to major neurologic disorders, such as diabetic neuropathy, potentially indicating earliest onsets of denervation. Here, the fine, hyperreflective, epithelial nerve structures located just above Bowman's membrane, are i) visualized using our µOCT prototype, ii) validated by comparison to fluorescence confocal microscopy (including selective immunohistochemical staining), and iii) segmented using state-of-the-art image processing. Here, we also introduce polarization sensitive (PS) µOCT imaging, demonstrating, to the best of our knowledge, the highest resolution corneal PS-OCT scans reported to date.
我们展示了切除的猪和非人灵长类动物角膜形态微观结构的最高分辨率（1.5×1.5×1 µm）微米光学相干断层扫描（µOCT）成像。除了上皮、基质和内皮细胞形态外，本报告重点研究最周边的角膜神经纤维，即基底丛下神经丛（SBP）的神经纤维。据报道，SBP神经密度和组成的改变与主要的神经系统疾病有关，如糖尿病性神经病变，这可能预示着去神经支配的最早发作。在这里，位于Bowman膜上方的细小、高反射性上皮神经结构，i）使用我们的µOCT原型进行可视化，ii）通过与荧光共聚焦显微镜（包括选择性免疫组织化学染色）比较进行验证，iii）使用最先进的图像处理进行分割。在这里，我们还引入了偏振敏感（PS）µOCT成像，据我们所知，展示了迄今为止报道的最高分辨率角膜PS-OCT扫描。
