Our long-term goal is to establish a direct, accurate, and clinically viable method for measuring corneal hydration, enabling earlier detection, more precise diagnosis, and improved management of corneal diseases and postoperative complications. The objective of this study is to develop and validate Brillouin based hydration mapping as a diagnostic tool to quantify water content in the cornea across healthy individuals and patients with diverse ocular conditions. Our central hypothesis is that spatially resolved Brillouin frequency shifts can reveal disease-specific hydration profiles that are not detectable through conventional thickness-based methods. This hypothesis is based on recent evidence from our group demonstrating that Brillouin microscopy is sensitive to hydration. The rationale for this research is that Brillouin-based hydration maps will offer an unprecedented, morphology-independent metric of corneal fluid balance, which could improve clinical decision-making in a range of pathologies.
