Method and system to detect ophthalmic tissue structure and pathologies

An apparatus to determine an ophthalmic tissue pathology, comprising:

• an axial scanner with a physical probe configured to be inserted into an eye and moved along a scanning line to measure retinal image data for a range of depths corresponding to a target point in an eye;
• an imaging processor coupled to a memory, configured
• to determine retinal image information from the image data, including identifying two or more image features in the image data that represent boundaries of tissue layers along the scanning line,
• to identify a retinal tissue pathology corresponding to the target point from the image information by comparing the two or more image features representing boundaries of tissue layers at a first portion of the scanning line to the two or more image features representing boundaries of tissue layers at a different, second portion of the scanning line;
• and
• to determine, based on the identified retinal tissue pathology, a type of the retinal tissue pathology based on retinal pathology data stored in the memory;
• to generate a signal, a to indicate to a user the type of the retinal tissue pathology, wherein the signal comprises a change to a characteristic of a light beam visible in a surgical field that corresponds to the type of the retinal tissue pathology.

An apparatus to determine an ophthalmic tissue pathology, comprising:

• an axial scanner with a physical probe configured to be inserted into an eye and moved along a scanning line to measure retinal image data for a range of depths corresponding to a sequence of target points in an eye, the sequence of target points being distributed along the scanning line;
• an imaging processor coupled to a memory, configured
• to determine retinal image information from the image data, including identifying two or more image features in the image data that represent boundaries of retinal tissue layers along the scanning line, and
• to identify a retinal tissue pathology corresponding to the target points from the image information by comparing the two or more image features representing boundaries of tissue layers at a first portion of the scanning line to the two or more image features representing boundaries of tissue layers at a different, second portion of the scanning line;
• and
• to determine, based on the identified retinal tissue pathology, a type of the retinal tissue pathology based on retinal pathology data stored in the memory;
• and
• a visual user indicator system inserted into the eye and configured to, generate a signal to indicate to a user the type of the tissue pathology, wherein the signal comprises a change to a characteristic of a light beam visible in a surgical field that corresponds to a the type of the retinal tissue pathology.