Maya Mizuno, Hideaki Kitahara, Kensuke Sasaki, Masahiko Tani, Masami Kojima, Yukihisa Suzuki, Takafumi Tasaki, Yoshinori Tatematsu, Masafumi Fukunari, and Kanako Wake
 |
| Schematic diagram of the setups of specimens for (a) ATR and (b) T-type dielectric constant measurement, and reflectance measurement systems for (c) vertical and (d) oblique incidences. The white arrow in the left x-y image of (c) indicates the position with the largest reflection signal. |
The dielectric constant of the normal corneal tissue of a rabbit eye was obtained in vitro in the range from approximately 0.1 to 1 THz, and the drying process on the eye surface exposed to high-power terahertz waves was investigated by in vivo reflectance measurement using terahertz time-domain spectroscopy. When the rabbit eye was exposed to terahertz waves at 162 GHz for 6 min with an irradiation power of 360 or 480 mW/cm2, the reflectance temporally increased and then decreased with a temperature increase. Based on multiple-reflection calculation using the dielectric constant and anterior segment optical coherence tomography images, those changes in reflectance were attributed to drying of the tear and epithelium of the cornea, respectively. Furthermore, the drying progressed over a temperature increase of around 5°C under our exposure conditions. These findings suggest that the possibility of eye damage increases with the progress of drying and that the setting of the eye surface conditions can be a cause of disagreement between computational and experimental data of absorbed energy under high-level irradiation because reflectance is related to terahertz wave penetration in the eye tissue. The time-domain spectroscopic measurements were useful for the acquisition of the dielectric constant as well as for the real-time monitoring of the eye conditions during exposure measurement.
© 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement
