Abstract
The study of the electrical response of the retina to a luminous stimulus is one of the mainfields of research in ocular electrophysiology. The features of the first component (a-wave)of the retinal response reflect the functional integrity of the two populations ofphotoreceptors: rods and cones. We fit the a-wave for pathological subjects with functionsthat account for possible mechanisms governing the kinetics of the photoreceptors. Thepaper extends a previous analysis, carried out for normal subjects, in which bothpopulations are active, to patients affected by two particular diseases that reduce theworking populations to only one. The pathologies investigated are Achromatopsia, acone disease, and Congenital Stationary Night Blindness, a rod problem. Wepresent evidence that the analysis of a pathological a-wave can be employed toquantitatively measure either cone or rod activities and to test hypotheses abouttheir responses. The results show that the photoreceptoral responses differ in thetwo cases and functions implying a different number of photocascade stages arenecessary to achieve a correct modeling of the early phototransduction process.Numerical values of the parameters characterizing the best-fit functions are given anddiscussed.
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