Corneal hydration assessment indicator based on terahertz time domain spectroscopy

Terahertz technology has shown broad prospects for measuring corneal water content, which is an important parameter of ocular health. Based on terahertz time-domain spectroscopy, a new indicator named characteristic ratio (CR) of the sum of low (0.2-0.7 THz) and high (0.7-1.0 THz) frequency spectral intensities, for characterizing corneal hydration is introduced in this work. CR is calculated from the real-time reflection spectra after error elimination of ex vivo human corneal stroma samples which is collected during dehydration under natural conditions (temperature: 22.4 ± 0.3°C; humidity: 20.0 ± 3%). The corresponding relationships between CR and corneal water content are reported. Comparing the linear fitting results with the published similar study, the coefficients of variation of the fitting slope and intercept are 39.4% and 27.6% lower, respectively. This indicates that this approach has the potential to achieve corneal water content in-vivo detection in the future.