Are your eyes healthy? New research shows: Heartbeat can measure eye health!

The heartbeat can be used to measure not only the health of the body, but it may soon help us measure and assess the health of the eyes, too, according to new scientific research. If doctors can measure the pulse of the eye to diagnose corneal pathology, it could save sight and possibly lives. Every heartbeat sends a pulse wave of blood that causes very small but measurable changes in the volume of the eye, resulting in a momentary rise in eye pressure. Starting from the hypothesis that changes in the elasticity or stiffness of the eye could indicate major structural or functional changes:

Researchers are looking for ways to accurately measure the biomechanics of the eye. According to Kirill Larin, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Houston's Cullen College of Engineering and a SPIE researcher, accurate measurement of corneal biomechanics will not only affect the clinical interpretation of diagnostic tests, such as by measuring intraocular pressure or evaluating the effectiveness of drug therapy, but also predict the occurrence of posterior eye diseases such as glaucoma. Currently, there is no reliable method to quantitatively measure the elasticity of the cornea in living eyes. To meet this clinical need, Dr. Larin's team is developing a new method for completely "non-contact" assessment of corneal biomechanics.

This method is convenient for patients and will improve the medical understanding of corneal diseases, allow the development of new clinical treatments and interventions, and improve the results of current surgical and therapeutic interventions. The latest progress of the research was published in the SPIE journal Biomedical Optics. In 2013, Rainer A. Leitgeb first demonstrated the possibility of using phase-sensitive optical coherence tomography (OCT) to measure the movement of eye tissue due to heartbeat. Inspired by this research, Kirill Larin's team is currently studying the use of OCT for elastic imaging to infer the mechanical properties of corneal tissue.

Retractable eyes

Their method, called heartbeat optical coherence elastography (HB-OCE), uses changes in intraocular pressure caused by the heartbeat to infer the mechanical properties of the cornea. The researchers note that preliminary results from simulations with porcine corneal tissue suggest that assessing corneal stiffness with reference to intraocular pressure fluctuations may be feasible for evaluating corneal elasticity in living tissue. "The concept of using the body's own motion to extract dynamic mechanical information has been used in various versions of elastography, but has particularly good relevance to imaging and sensing in the living eye," said Brian Pogue, professor of engineering science at Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering.

It is widely believed that the mechanical properties of the cornea are closely related to many ocular diseases and can be used to evaluate disease progression and response to treatment. Elastography is the most important method for evaluating the mechanical properties of the cornea, but it usually requires some type of external stimulation to induce measurable displacement in the tissue. Because the distance is small and the sensitivity to blood pulsation is relatively high, this groundbreaking research will help determine the next steps for clinical testing of this concept. The researchers pointed out that the HB-OCE method may have potential use in living clinical applications as a method to detect different pathophysiological conditions related to blood and blood vessels in the eye, such as diabetes.

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Boco Park | Research/Source: SPIE

The study was published in the journal Biomedical Optics

DOI: 10.1117/1.JBO.25.5.055001

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