The requirement for correct dosage of the transcription factor Pax6 during corneal growth and development was investigated using the Pax6-overexpressing (PAX77) transgenic mouse. Transgenics had a microcornea phenotype due to failure of postnatal growth, associated with reduction in the number of cells layers in the corneal epithelium. Cell cycle progression was monitored using bromodeoxyuridin...

CASTROVEJO (1955) stated that opacities of the cornea, provided that they did not involve the whole thickness might be removed by clean dissection of the affected external layers. If infection, formation of granulation tissue, or revascularization is prevented during the post-operative period, the epithelium grows over the dissected area, the cornea remains transparent or fairly transparent, an...

The authors studied the distribution of specific keratins within the superior, inferior, medial, and lateral regions of human limbus and cornea to determine whether the limbal epithelium exhibits regional heterogeneity in its microstructure. A corneal epithelial basic keratin (K3), recognized by monoclonal antibody AE5, was immunohistochemically undetectable in the basal layers of the limbus in...

PURPOSE Two major functions of thrombin observed in the cornea are activation of thrombin-sensitive, proteinase-activated receptors and cleavage of fibrinogen to fibrin. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the normal human cornea itself is competent to convert prothrombin to thrombin and synthesizes the mRNA for the proteins required. METHODS Human corneas were processed for im...

An optical coherence tomography (OCT) for high axial resolution corneal imaging is presented. The system uses 375 nm bandwidth (625 to 1000 nm) from a broadband supercontinuum light source. The system was developed in free space to minimize image quality degradation due to dispersion. A custom-designed spectrometer based on a Czerny Turner configuration was implemented to achieve an imaging dep...

There is an evolution in the demands of modern ophthalmology from descriptive findings to assessment of cellular-level changes by using in vivo confocal microscopy. Confocal microscopy, by producing greyscale images, enables a microstructural insight into the in vivo cornea in both health and disease, including epithelial changes, stromal degenerative or dystrophic diseases, endothelial patholo...

Diagnosis of corneal diseases is possible by measuring and evaluation of corneal thickness in different layers. Thus, the need for precise segmentation of corneal layer boundaries is inevitable. Obviously, manual segmentation is time-consuming and imprecise. In this paper, the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is used for automatic segmentation of three clinically important corneal boundaries on opt...

Bone marrow-derived cells (BMCs) reside in the anterior stroma of the central and paracentral cornea, as well as all stromal layers of the peripheral cornea, in normal human eyes. We investigated the factors regulating the constitutive distribution of BMCs in normal human corneal stroma. Cultured human corneal keratocytes expressed several chemokines (growth-related oncogene/CXCL1-3, IL-8/CXCL8...

PURPOSE We investigated the keratocyte response and stromal remodeling after corneal incision and photorefractive keratectomy to understand the histophysiological and immunohistochemical differences between these two types of surgery. METHODS Corneal incision or photorefractive keratectomy was performed in rabbits or rats. Then we chronologically observed the histological changes and the chan...