Two- and three-dimensional visualization of the living cornea and ocular lens

Abstract

This paper describes the visualization of the living cornea and the in-situ ocular lens. Laser scanning confocal microscopy of a freshly enucleated rabbit eye was performed to obtain two-dimensional optical sections. These optical sections were used to reconstruct the three-dimensional views of the cornea and ocular lens using the volume-rendering method. In the reflected light mode the cornea and the ocular lens are almost transparent and have extremely low contrast when observed in a normal light microscope. The images obtained with the confocal light microscope system shows submicron resolution in the image plane. The confocal light microscope provides high resolution, high contrast images of living ocular tissue. The image quality of the resulting confocal images rivals that obtained from electron microscope of fixed, stained, and coated tissue specimens. This paper demonstrates the quality of confocal microscope images and the feasibility of their three-dimensional reconstruction using computer volume-rendering techniques.