Effects of fibril orientations on light scattering in the cornea.

It is generally assumed that the collagen fibrils in the stroma are the primary scatters of light in the nearly transparent cornea of the eye. We derive a scaling relationship between scattering angle and light wavelength that should hold if this hypothesis is valid. The derivation accounts for the cornea's layered nature and the azimuthal orientations of the fibrils in the different layers. The fibrils are treated as finite-length cylinders, and the scaling relation is obtained in both the far- and the intermediate-field zones. The predicted relationship is verified experimentally for normal-thickness rabbit corneas.