Abstract
Purpose :
To report the clinical validation of a newly designed and implemented confocal adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscope (AOSLO) device in the context of the LITE (“Development of advanced laser imaging techniques for the anterior and posterior eye”) study.
Methods :
A prospective,observational,1-year study was conducted at the Institut de la Màcula (Barcelona, Spain) between August 2015 and November 2016 to validate the instrument. After testing the device in healthy subjects, patients with Stargardt’s disease(STG) or retinitis pigmentosa(RP) were enrolled and visited at baseline, 3, 6 and 12 months. At each visit complete ophthalmic exam and retinal imaging were performed, in addition to AOSLO in regions of interest.
Results :
Twenty-two patients were screened and 16 met the eligibility criteria: 5 healthy, 6 with STG and 5 with RP. Patients with degenerative diseases had a median of 47 years old (range, 35 to 64), there were 45.5% (5/11) females and 81.8% (9/11) were right eyes. Median baseline best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) was 78 letters (range, 54 to 91) and median macular sensitivity was 16.8 dB (range, 3.5 to 27.8). AOSLO imaged a regular mosaic of photoreceptors in healthy individuals (Figure 1). In STG and RP patients (Figure 2) AOSLO showed irregular mosaics even in normal-appearing areas, according to fundus autofluorescence(FAF) and/or spectral domain optical coherence tomography(SD-OCT). These findings highlight the sensitivity of AOSLO imaging tools for assessing retina mosaic structure; moreover, damage to the outer retinal layers identified on AOSLO precedes that seen with current state-of-the-art instruments.
Conclusions :
The newly developed AOSLO provided high-quality images of the photoreceptors(or lack thereof) in STG and RP, and may provide insights into disease progression and pathogenesis.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2017 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Baltimore, MD, May 7-11, 2017.