title: Assessment of corneal properties based on statistical modeling of OCT speckle.
abstract: A new approach to assess the properties of the corneal micro-structurein vivobased on the statistical modeling of speckle obtained from Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is presented. A number of statistical models were proposed to fit the corneal speckle data obtained from OCT raw image. Short-term changes in corneal properties were studied by inducing corneal swelling whereas age-related changes were observed analyzing data of sixty-five subjects aged between twenty-four and seventy-three years. Generalized Gamma distribution has shown to be the best model, in terms of the Akaike's Information Criterion, to fit the OCT corneal speckle. Its parameters have shown statistically significant differences (Kruskal-Wallis,p< 0.001) for short and age-related corneal changes. In addition, it was observed that age-related changes influence the corneal biomechanical behaviour when corneal swelling is induced. This study shows that Generalized Gamma distribution can be utilized to modeling corneal speckle in OCTin vivoproviding complementary quantified information where micro-structure of corneal tissue is of essence.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Wroclaw, 50-370 Poland.
authors.forename: Danilo A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Jesus
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Wroclaw, 50-370 Poland.
authors.forename: D Robert
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Iskander
keywords: (030.6140) Speckle; (110.6150) Speckle imaging; (170.4500) Optical coherence tomography; (170.4580) Optical diagnostics for medicine; (170.6935) Tissue characterization