Monitoring corneal hydration with a mid-infrared (IR) laser.

A mid-infrared (IR) source at ∼ 3 μm radiation is used as a probe to measure hydration in porcine cornea. Since the Er(3+):YAG emission targets vibrational modes (around 3300 cm(-1)) in the H2O molecule, it is highly sensitive to changes in water content in the first ∼ 10 μm of the corneal tissue.

Quasi-real-time fluorescence imaging with lifetime dependent contrast.

Conventional fluorescence lifetime imaging requires complicated algorithms to extract lifetimes of fluorophores and acquisition of multiple data points at progressively longer delay times to characterize tissues. To address diminishing signal-to-noise ratios at these progressively longer time delays, we report a time-resolved fluorescence imaging method, normalized fluorescence yield imaging that does not require the extraction of lifetimes. The concept is to extract the "contrast" instead of the lifetime value of the fluorophores by using simple mathematical algorithms.