Photon correlation spectroscopy in ophthalmology

On the basis of the theory of light scattering, photon correlation spectroscopy has been used for more than three decades to study ocular tissues. From first in-vitro experiments to study cataractogenesis, this approach has been extended to characterize semi-quantitatively in-vivo all the ocular tissues from cornea to retina and choroids. In order to acquire high quality measurement data from the experiments, serious attention has to be paid to the detector and processing system performance. Detector noise, sensitivity, dead time and afterpulsing lead to a direct or indirect corruption of the acquired correlation function whereas counting range and resolution should be optimized to take into account the wide variability of the ocular tissue optical characteristics.