Linear Measurement of Corneal Density in Anterior Segment Spectral Optical Coherence Tomography (LM-SD-OCT)

Purpose: assess the accuracy of linear corneal density measurements obtained using spectral domain optical coherence tomography (OCT) in various images of normal corneas with the Image J program. Methods: Descriptive, cross-sectional, and observational study. Corneal images were captured using OCT Heidelberg Engineering with an anterior segment lens to calculate the average density of each layer in healthy corneas. We included subjects without corneal pathologies or surgeries and categorized them based on their age: 30 to 50 years, 51 to 70 years, and older than 70 years. The program image J of the NIH was used to calibrate the OCT image at a standardized value of 200 µm. Densities were obtained for the central cornea using high-resolution 8-bit images with 256 gray levels. Results: Spectral corneal OCT images of 140 eyes (170 patients) were analyzed, comprising 90 males and 80 females. The average gray value density for each corneal layer was determined, as follows: Te ar layer (238.25 ± 17.49), epithelium interface (91.55 ± 17), basal membrane and Bowman’s membrane (167.76 ± 16.19), anterior stroma (152.06 ± 9.09), posterior stroma (130.24 ± 8.32), and Descemet membrane (149.21 ± 7.80). Notably, optical densities significantly varied across different age groups and corneal layers (p Conclusions: The linear corneal layer densities obtained using the linear mode of spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) with Image J were a fast and practical method to complement the subjective descriptions of spectral anterior segment OCT images. These densities can then be compared across various pathologies.