Calculation of the permeability of the blood-retinal barrier to fluorescein.

A method is presented, for calculation of the permeability of the blood-retinal barrier to fluorescein which is based upon simultaneous determination of the free fluorescein concentration in plasma and the fluorescein concentration profile in the vitreous body. By aid of a simplified mathematical model of the eye the blood-retinal barrier permeability is calculated automatically on a computer from corresponding values of the fluorescein concentration in plasma and in the vitreous body. The present method eliminates some of the factors of uncertainty, which have been present in earlier applied fluorophotometric methods, thus contributing to increasing the exactness of the fluorophotometric method for the estimation of the permeability of the blood-retinal barrier to fluorescein. Apart from the permeability of the barrier, the diffusion coefficient for fluorescein in the vitreous body is also estimated by the present method.