Quantitative assessment of human donor corneal endothelium with Gabor domain optical coherence microscopy

We report on a pathway for Gabor domain optical coherence microscopy (GD-OCM)-based metrology to assess the donor’s corneal endothelial layers ex vivo. Six corneas from the Lions Eye Bank at Albany and Rochester were imaged with GD-OCM. The raw 3-D images of the curved corneas were flattened using custom software to enhance the 2-D visualization of endothelial cells (ECs); then the ECs within a circle of 500-μm-diameter were analyzed using a custom corner method and a cell counting plugin in ImageJ. The EC number, EC area, endothelial cell density (ECD), and polymegethism (CV) were quantified in five different locations for each cornea. The robustness of the method (defined as the repeatability of measurement together with interoperator variability) was evaluated by independently repeating the entire ECD measurement procedure six times by three different examiners. The results from the six corneas show that the current modality reproduces the ECDs with a standard deviation of 2.3% of the mean ECD in every location, whereas the mean ECD across five locations varies by 5.1%. The resolution and imaging area provided through the use of GD-OCM may help to ultimately better assess the quality of donor corneas in transplantation.