Mujat Mircea, Sampani Konstantina, Patel Ankit H, Sun Jennifer K, Iftimia Nicusor
Physical Sciences, Inc., 20 New England Business Center, Andover, MA 01810, USA.
Beetham Eye Institute, Joslin Diabetes Center, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
Diagnostics (Basel). 2023 Nov 8;13(22):3399. doi: 10.3390/diagnostics13223399.
Diseases such as diabetes affect the retinal vasculature and the health of the neural retina, leading to vision problems. We describe here an imaging method and analysis procedure that enables characterization of the retinal vessel walls with cellular-level resolution, potentially providing markers for eye diseases. Adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy is used with a modified detection scheme to include four simultaneous offset aperture channels. The magnitude of the phase gradient derived from these offset images is used to visualize the structural characteristics of the vessels. The average standard deviation image provides motion contrast and enables segmentation of the vessel lumen. Segmentation of blood vessel walls provides quantitative measures of geometrical characteristics of the vessel walls, including vessel and lumen diameters, wall thickness, and wall-to-lumen ratio. Retinal diseases may affect the structural integrity of the vessel walls, their elasticity, their permeability, and their geometrical characteristics. The ability to measure these changes is valuable for understanding the vascular effects of retinal diseases, monitoring disease progression, and drug testing. In addition, loss of structural integrity of the blood vessel wall may result in microaneurysms, a hallmark lesion of diabetic retinopathy, which may rupture or leak and further create vision impairment. Early identification of such structural abnormalities may open new treatment avenues for disease management and vision preservation. Functional testing of retinal circuitry through high-resolution measurement of vasodilation as a response to controlled light stimulation of the retina (neurovascular coupling) is another application of our method and can provide an unbiased evaluation of one's vision and enable early detection of retinal diseases and monitoring treatment results.
糖尿病等疾病会影响视网膜血管系统和神经视网膜的健康，导致视力问题。我们在此描述一种成像方法和分析程序，该方法能够以细胞水平分辨率对视网膜血管壁进行表征，有可能为眼部疾病提供标志物。自适应光学扫描激光检眼镜与一种改进的检测方案配合使用，该方案包括四个同时偏移的孔径通道。从这些偏移图像中得出的相位梯度大小用于可视化血管的结构特征。平均标准差图像提供运动对比度并能够对血管腔进行分割。血管壁的分割提供了血管壁几何特征的定量测量，包括血管和管腔直径、壁厚以及壁腔比。视网膜疾病可能会影响血管壁的结构完整性、弹性、通透性及其几何特征。测量这些变化的能力对于理解视网膜疾病的血管效应、监测疾病进展以及药物测试具有重要价值。此外，血管壁结构完整性的丧失可能会导致微动脉瘤，这是糖尿病视网膜病变的标志性病变，可能会破裂或渗漏并进一步导致视力损害。早期识别此类结构异常可能为疾病管理和视力保护开辟新的治疗途径。通过对视网膜的受控光刺激（神经血管耦合）的反应进行血管舒张的高分辨率测量来对视网膜回路进行功能测试是我们方法的另一个应用，并且可以对一个人的视力进行无偏评估，并能够早期检测视网膜疾病并监测治疗结果。
