Abstract
Corneal blindness is a leading cause of vision loss worldwide. Corneal curvature and transparency depend on the cornea’s unique collagen fibril architecture and, while much progress has been made in mapping collagen structure in cadaveric corneas, there is currently no way of imaging collagen fibril organization in the living eye. Our ultimate goal is to develop new artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted bioimaging technology to map collagen structure in live patient corneas. Here we present results from SPring-8 beamline BL40B2 in the form of wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS) maps of corneal structure from ex-vivo porcine eyes, which were previously scanned via optical coherence tomography (OCT), and will be used as a platform to train machine learning algorithms to “read” the equivalent in-vivo data from OCT images obtained from human patients.
