Method to track and measure loss of inner retinal neurons in the living human eye

Kazuhiro Kurokawa; Furu Zhang; James A. Crowell; Ayoub Lassoued; Donald T. Miller

doi:10.1117/12.2508909

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28 February 2019 Method to track and measure loss of inner retinal neurons in the living human eye

Kazuhiro Kurokawa, Furu Zhang, James A. Crowell, Ayoub Lassoued, Donald T. Miller

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Proceedings Volume 10858, Ophthalmic Technologies XXIX; 108580L (2019) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2508909
Event: SPIE BiOS, 2019, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

The ganglion cell (GC) is the primary cell type damaged by diseases of the optic nerve such as glaucoma. Assessment of individual glaucoma risk is limited by our inability to accurately measure GC degeneration and loss. Recently, adaptive optics optical coherence tomography (AO-OCT) has enabled visualization and quantification of individual GC layer (GCL) somas in normal, healthy subjects. Quantifying GC loss in glaucoma, however, requires longitudinal assessment of these cells, which is confounded by normal age-related loss of these same cells. The ability to distinguish between these two causes of cell death is therefore paramount for early detection of glaucoma. In this study, we assess the ability of our AO-OCT method to track individual GCL somas over a period of one year and of our post processing methods to reliably measure soma loss rates. In four normal subjects with no history of ocular disease, we measured a soma loss rate of 0.15±0.04 %/yr (average±SD). As expected, this rate is more consistent with loss due to normal aging (~0.5%/yr) than to glaucomatous progression (~4.6%/yr). Aside from these rare isolated losses, the GCL soma mosaic was highly stable over the one year interval examined. Our measurements of peak GCL soma density did not differ significantly from histology reported in the literature.

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Kazuhiro Kurokawa, Furu Zhang, James A. Crowell, Ayoub Lassoued, and Donald T. Miller "Method to track and measure loss of inner retinal neurons in the living human eye", Proc. SPIE 10858, Ophthalmic Technologies XXIX, 108580L (28 February 2019); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2508909

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