Abstract
The pathogenesis of bullous keratopathy is corneal endothelial decompensation, resulting that the clinical appearance of bullous keratopathy is corneal stromal edema. Currently, the treatment trend for bullous keratopathy is changing from penetrating keratoplasty to corneal endothelial keratoplasty, which requires stromal transparency of patients'cornea. Thus we detected corneal stromal scar formation in bullous keratopathy by applying Second Harmonic Generation Imaging Microscopy for observing corneal stroma collagen lamellae structure and the phenotypes of corneal stromal cells. Furthermore, we analyzed the relationship between pathological changes in bullous keratopathy corneas and stromal edema duration. Our observation revealed that stromal edema duration affected to the appearance of scar formation in corneal stroma of bullous keratopathy and it also affected to the post operative visual acuity of corneal endothelial keratoplasty. Our pathological and clinical analysis demonstrated that bullous keratopathy is stromal edema duration-dependent progressive disease.
