A Cost-effective Light Emitting Diode-acoustic System for Preclinical Ocular Applications

Opto-acoustic systems provide structural and functional information regarding biological tissues. Conventional opto-acoustic systems typically employ continuous or pulsed lasers as transmission sources. Compared to lasers, light emitting diodes (LEDs) are cost-effective and relatively portable excitation sources but are non, coherent. Therefore, in this study, a relatively low cost lens - a type of Ramsden eyepiece - was specially designed to theoretically calculate the illumination and achieve a constant brightness across the pupil of an eye. In order to verify the capability of the developed light-emitting diode-acoustic (LEDA) systems, we carried out experiments on bovine and bigeye tuna eyeball samples, which are of similar size to the human eye, using low frequency (10 MHz) and high frequency (25 MHz) ultrasound transducers. High frequency ultrasound transducers are able to provide higher spatial resolution compared to low frequency ultrasound transducers at the expense of penetration depth. Using the 10 MHz and 25 MHz ultrasound transducers, acceptable echo signals (3.82, 3.94, and 5.84 mV at 10 MHz and 282, 1557, 2356 mV at 25 MHz) from depth greater than 3 cm and 6 cm from the anterior surface of the eye were obtained. We thereby confirmed that the LEDA system using a pulsed LED with the designed Ramsden eyepiece lens, used in conjunction with low and high frequency ultrasound transducers, has the potential to be a cost-effective alternative method, while providing adequate acoustic signals from bovine and bigeye tuna ocular areas.