Abstract

It is generally assumed that the collagen fibrils in the stroma are the primary scatterers of light in the nearly transparent cornea of the eye. We derive a scaling relationship between scattering angle and light wavelength that should hold if this hypothesis is valid. The derivation accounts for the cornea’s layered nature and the azimuthal orientations of the fibrils in the different layers. The fibrils are treated as finite-length cylinders, and the scaling relation is obtained in both the far- and the intermediate-field zones. The predicted relationship is verified experimentally for normal-thickness rabbit corneas.

© 1986 Optical Society of America

Direct summation of fields for light scattering by fibrils with applications to normal corneas

D. E. Freund, R. L. McCally, and R. A. Farrell
Appl. Opt. 25(16) 2739-2746 (1986)

Corneal small-angle light-scattering theory: wavy fibril models

R. H. Andreo and R. A. Farrell
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 72(11) 1479-1492 (1982)

Numerical modeling of the cornea’s lamellar structure and birefringence properties

D. J. Donohue, B. J. Stoyanov, R. L. McCally, and R. A. Farrell
J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 12(7) 1425-1438 (1995)

Light Scattering in the Cornea*

Robert W. Hart and Richard A. Farrell
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 59(6) 766-774 (1969)

Second harmonic generation imaging of collagen fibrils in cornea and sclera

Meng Han, Günter Giese, and Josef F. Bille
Opt. Express 13(15) 5791-5797 (2005)