Innovative Imaging Techniques to Accelerate the Discovery of New… – Healthcare Tech Outlook

To employ this technology for patient imaging and to aid in interpreting outcomes from stem cell therapy and gene therapy trials for inherited retinal illnesses.

FREMONT, CA: Optoretinography is an imaging technique that examines light-induced functional activity in the retina, the network of neurons at the back of the eye responsible for detecting light and initiating vision. Researchers have devised a simple and rapid method for doing optoretinography. Retinal illnesses, such as macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, afflict over half of the U.S. population over 60. Researchers have previously utilized adaptive optics and optical coherence tomography (OCT) to view and track these neurons in the living, moving eye and then employed motion correction techniques to stabilize the images and extract the functional response. These illnesses impair the retina's function in ways that can lead to blindness if left untreated. The new strategy could expedite the discovery of novel eye disease medicines.

Monitoring form change: Optoretinography identifies minute alterations in the structure of neurons that create or transmit retinal signals. This expensive and time-consuming procedure includes resolving and recording the position of individual cellular characteristics and using those positions to assess if the cell's shape has altered. The requirement is to determine and monitor individual neurons by measuring the velocity, or speed, at which retinal neurons move relative to one another. While utilizing adaptive optics systems to do optoretinography measurements, the experiment can easily take a half-day and generate a terabyte of data that must analyze. Processing the data to obtain a functional signal requires a minimum of two additional days.

Measuring neuronal activity

For velocity-based optoretinography, the researchers created a new OCT camera that enables a single operator to collect retinal images from more sites than is possible with previous optoretinography methods. The innovative procedure is by collecting measurements from three participants in good health. In under ten minutes, they could collect data from each patient, a process that data, and make the results public. They demonstrated that the functional optoretinographic responses obtained with the simple method were proportional to the light stimulus dose and that the dose-stimulus response was reproducible across subjects. The researchers would like to adapt the new optoretinography technique to animal models of retinal illness.

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Innovative Imaging Techniques to Accelerate the Discovery of New... - Healthcare Tech Outlook