ABSTRACT

Department of Information Engineering, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia,

Modena, 41100 Italy

Rafat R. Ansari

NASA Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, OH 44135, USA

16.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 488

16.2 Basic Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489

16.3 Anatomy and Properties of the Human Eye of Interest for Polarimetric

Measurements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 490

16.4 Optical Access to the Aqueous: Tangential Path and Brewster Scheme

Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 493

16.5 Glucose Sensor Based on the Brewster Scheme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 498

16.6 Performance of the Glucose Sensor Based on the Brewster Scheme . . . . . . . . 501

16.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 523

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 524

The objective of this chapter is to introduce a new optical concept for measuring

glucose concentration in the aqueous humor. This concept involves reflecting the

incident circularly polarized light off of the ocular lens at Brewster angle and by

detecting and analyzing the linearly polarized light as it traverses through the eye’s

anterior chamber. This light acts as a glucose measuring “tool” by giving information

on the optical activity of the glucose molecules present in the aqueous. Potentially

this technique can be very useful in the management of diabetes.