Rapid motion-tracking Brillouin microscopy for clinical ophthalmology

Brillouin microscopy with motion-tracking OCT has emerged as an impactful technique to assess clinically relevant spatial mechanical properties of the eye in keratoconus, ectasia, and presbyopia patients. These imaging sessions take almost 30 minutes per patient, and must be reduced to around 5 minutes to properly implement in the clinical pipeline. To address this, we implemented a next-generation Brillouin instrument capable of 5-fold reduction in acquisition time. Through improvements in multimode fiber, Rubidium filtering, and single-stage VIPA spectrometer design, we achieved a system with 10 mW operating power, 10 ms per spectra, and a water shift precision of <10 MHz.