Biospeckle in the human sclera and impact on laser speckle correlation measurement of eye tremor

Abstract

Ocular microtremor (OMT) is an involuntary fixational eye movement. We identify the implications of biospeckle for a noninvasive, laser speckle correlation technique to measure OMT. Biospeckle from the in-vivo eye is characterized and, using the resulting characteristics, a mathematical model to describe the biospeckle from the eye is designed and tested. Through in-vivo measurements, biospeckle is shown to disrupt the temporal stability of the speckle images over time. However, provided each speckle image is cross correlated with the previous image within a sufficiently short time, the stability of speckle images captured from the eye is shown to be adequate to measure OMT-like displacements. © 2013 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).