Atomic Force Microscopy Crosslinks Interdisciplinary Eye Research

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 License (CC BY-NC 3.0), which allows users to read, copy, distribute and make derivative works for non-commercial purposes from the material, as long as the author of the original work is cited properly. Over the past decades, it has always been a pleasure to see how the field of medical research unites with other areas of scientific expertise for the sake of medical progress. From these connections, groundbreaking beneficial devices and applications like computed axial tomography (CAT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have sprung (1, 2). In the ophthalmology departments and eye clinics, it has as well become almost impossible to imagine life without optical coherence tomography (OCT), surgical lasers and a variety of other techniques. Their constant refinements and upgrades by medical and natural scientists working together make them even more effective and indispensable in ophthalmologic practice. In the examples given here, medical engineers and physicists play the main roles, working hand in hand with physicians and medical researchers, to invent new diagnostic tools and therapeutic strategies. For the ophthalmological research, giant leaps forward are often accomplished when physics departments or facilities and institutions of classical eye-related research share promising projects and common hypotheses. Ocular biomechanics is a wonderful example of a research area defined by both biomedical and physical aspects of normal and pathologically altered ocular tissues. In the past, uniaxial and biaxial stress-strain measurements were used to biomechanically characterize the viscoelasticity of the posterior sclera near the optic nerve head (3,4). This region, called peripapillary sclera, is assumed to be of critical importance in the development of glaucoma. As a matter of fact, nearby tissue, the lamina cribrosa, is actually