Figure 1.  .

WAXS data analysis. (A) WAXS pattern from the peripapillary region of human sclera. The two-lobed appearance of the collagen intermolecular x-ray reflection is indicative of uniaxial fiber alignment in the direction of the arrow. Inset: Example of a four-lobed WAXS pattern from the midposterior sclera, indicative of biaxial fiber alignment. (B) Power-law background function (broken line) fitted to a radial profile (solid line) through pattern shown in (A). For each pattern, 256 individual such background functions were fitted and subtracted along 256 equally spaced radial directions, enabling the collagen signal to be isolated and extracted in two dimensions. Arrow: Collagen signal peak. (C) Angular x-ray scatter intensity profile of pattern shown in (A). The scatter may be separated into that arising from isotropically arranged collagen fibers (shaded region) and that arising from preferentially oriented fibers (clear region). (D) Aligned collagen scatter displayed as a polar vector plot, whose shape reveals the collagen anisotropy. The length of any line drawn from the center of the plot to its edge in a given direction is proportional to the relative number of fibers preferentially aligned in that direction. (E) Multiphoton microscopy image from mid-stromal depth, taken from the same specimen and region as the WAXS data. Second harmonic generation signals reveal highly aligned collagen fibril bundles, in agreement with the fiber orientation measurement by WAXS.