Abstract
The ability to image the entire anterior segment from anterior surface of the cornea to the posterior surface of the lens is crucial for understanding accommodation and the efficacy of accommodative intraocular lenses. A novel scanning system for an anterior segment optical coherence tomography (AS-OCT) system was designed to achieve this goal. In contrast to the traditional telecentric scanning method, this system shines OCT beams close to normal incidence on the ocular surfaces to increase the amount of light scattered back from those surfaces to the system. To achieve normal incidence on all the surfaces using one focusing system, one half of the system was designed to optimize signal for cornea and the anterior surface of the crystalline lens, while the other half for the posterior surface of the crystalline lens. The performance of the proposed scanning system was evaluated on a model eye and compared with traditional scan. SNR improvement of 5dB and 12dB was observed for the anterior and posterior lens surface respectively. For the posterior corneal surface SNR improvement of 4 dB was observed while the SNR improvement for anterior corneal surface was 0.7 dB.