OCT-based profiler for automating ocular surface prosthetic fitting(Conference Presentation)

The use of a Prosthetic Replacement of the Ocular Surface Environment (PROSE) device is a revolutionary treatment for military patients that have lost their eyelids due to 3rd degree facial burns and for civilians who suffer from a host of corneal diseases. However, custom manual fitting is often a protracted painful, inexact process that requires multiple fitting sessions. Training for new practitioners is a long process. Automated methods to measure the complete corneal and scleral topology would provide a valuable tool for both clinicians and PROSE device manufacturers and would help streamline the fitting process. PSI has developed an ocular anterior-segment profiler based on Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), which provides a 3D measure of the surface of the sclera and cornea. This device will provide topography data that will be used to expedite and improve the fabrication process for PROSE devices. OCT has been used to image portions of the cornea and sclera and to measure surface topology for smaller contact lenses [1-3]. However, current state-of-the-art anterior eye OCT systems can only scan about 16 mm of the eye’s anterior surface, which is not sufficient for covering the sclera around the cornea. In addition, there is no systematic method for scanning and aligning/stitching the full scleral/corneal surface and commercial segmentation software is not optimized for the PROSE application. Although preliminary, our results demonstrate the capability of PSI’s approach to generate accurate surface plots over relatively large areas of the eye, which is not currently possible with any other existing platform. Testing the technology on human volunteers is currently underway at Boston Foundation for Sight.