Abstract
Retinal vascular diseases are a leading cause of blindness and visual disability. The advent of adaptive optics retinal imaging has enabled us to image the retinal vascular at cellular resolutions, but imaging of the vasculature can be difficult due to the complex nature of the images, including features of many other retinal structures, such as the nerve fiber layer, glial and other cells. In this paper we show that varying the size and centration of the confocal aperture of an adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscope (AOSLO) can increase sensitivity to multiply scattered light, especially light forward scattered from the vasculature and erythrocytes. The resulting technique was tested by imaging regions with different retinal tissue reflectivities as well as within the optic nerve head.
Highlights
The ability to image the complex retinal microvasculature network is an important step in advancing our understanding of normal structure and function as well as pathological changes associated with sight-threatening retinal disease
Compromised retinal vascular structure and retinal blood flow have been reported in retinal diseases, our ability to image the retinal vasculature in vivo typically requires the injection of exogenous dyes such as sodium fluorescein or indocyanine green to enhance the normally low contrast found in the retinal tissues
In the absence of the more specular features, blood vessels and erythrocytes became a dominant feature of the image (Fig. 1D; Media 3)
Summary
The ability to image the complex retinal microvasculature network is an important step in advancing our understanding of normal structure and function as well as pathological changes associated with sight-threatening retinal disease. Compromised retinal vascular structure and retinal blood flow have been reported in retinal diseases, our ability to image the retinal vasculature in vivo typically requires the injection of exogenous dyes such as sodium fluorescein or indocyanine green to enhance the normally low contrast found in the retinal tissues. This is expensive, time intensive, and carries significant systemic risks in a small proportion of the population [3,4]. Advances in both direct detection techniques [5,6,7] and coherent detection techniques [8,9,10,11,12] have expanded our ability to map the retinal vasculature, but these techniques use variations over time to perform the mapping and do not provide an enhanced visualization of the vascular structures themselves.
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