Laser Speckle Contrast Imaging For Ophthalmic Diagnosis

The ability to monitor the progression of retinal vascular diseases like diabetic retinopathy in small animal models is often complicated by their failure to develop the end-stage complications which characterize the human phenotypes in disease.

Interestingly, as micro-vascular dysfunction typically precedes the onset of retinal vascular and even some neurodegenerative diseases, the ability to visualize and quantify hemodynamic changes (e.g., decreased flow or occlusion) in retinal vessels may serve as a useful diagnostic indicator of disease progression and as a therapeutic outcome measure in response to treatment.

Nevertheless, the ability to precisely and accurately quantify retinal hemodynamics remains an unmet challenge in ophthalmic research. Researchers demonstrate the ability to modify a commercial fundus camera into a low-cost laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) system for contrast-free and non-invasive quantification of relative changes to retinal hemodynamics over a wide field of view in a rodent model. Laser speckle contrast imaging is a promising but under-utilized modality in the context of studying retinal disease, a non-invasive technique capable of generating wide-field, contrast-free maps of blood flow based on flow rate with high spatiotemporal resolution.

Visualizing a diffuse surface illuminated by a coherent light source (e.g., a laser) in LSCI reveals a random speckle pattern in which the intensity (or brightness) of each pixel results from the coherent addition of backscattered light with different optical path lengths.

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