Purpose:
The dog and rabbit are important animal models of humanretinal disease and inflammatory ocular disease. The purposeof this project is to determine feasibility of obtaining canineand lapine retinal images using a new, high–resolution,hand–held spectral–domain optical coherence tomography(SD–OCT) system
Methods:
Normal dogs and rabbits were imaged using a high resolutionSD–OCT operating at an 820 nm center wavelength. The dogsand rabbits were dilated with 1% tropicamide. The non–contactunit was held approximately 1 cm from the corneal surface andimages were obtained over approximately 10 seconds.
Results:
Transverse images of the central retina were obtainedin manually restrained, awake or tranquilized dogs and awakerabbits. Resolution of the SD–OCT was 6 um, which allowedidentification of various layers of the retina in both species.Motion of the animals was a problem, but overcome with highimage rates (17 high resolution images/sec).
Conclusions:
Obtaining high resolution SD–OCT images andmeasurements were feasible from awake dogs and rabbits witha handheld system. This SD–OCT system will be especiallyuseful to image the retina of laboratory or clinical animalsin a variety of retinal studies.
Keywords: retina • imaging methods (CT, FA, ICG, MRI, OCT, RTA, SLO, ultrasound) • uveitis-clinical/animal model