Imaging Corneal Biomechanical Responses to Ocular Pulse Using High-Frequency Ultrasound

Imaging corneal biomechanical changes or abnormalities is important for better clinical diagnosis and treatment of corneal diseases. We propose a novel ultrasound-based method, called ocular pulse elastography (OPE), to image corneal deformation during the naturally occurring ocular pulse. Experiments on animal and human donor eyes, as well as synthetic radiofrequency (RF) data, were used to evaluate the efficacy of the OPE method. Using very high-frequency ultrasound (center frequency = 55 MHz), correlation-based speckle tracking yielded an accuracy of less than 10% error for axial tissue displacements of 0.5 μm or above. Satisfactory speckle tracking was achieved for out-of-plane displacements up to 32 μm. Using synthetic RF data with or without a predefined uniform strain, the OPE method detected strains down to 0.0001 axially and 0.00025 laterally with an error less than 10%. Experiments in human donor eyes showed excellent repeatability with an intraclass correlation of 0.98. The measurement outcome from OPE was also shown to be highly correlated with that of standard inflation. These results suggest the feasibility of OPE as a potential clinical tool for evaluating corneal biomechanics in vivo.