Visible-light optical coherence tomography-based multimodal systemfor quantitative fundus autofluorescence imaging

摘要

Fundus autofluorescence (FAF) imaging is commonly used in ophthalmic clinics fordiagnosis and monitoring of retinal diseases. Lipofuscin in the retinal pigmentepithelium (RPE), with A2E as its most abundant component and a visual cycleby-product, is the major fluorophore of FAF. Lipofuscin accumulates with age andis implicated in degenerative retinal diseases. The amount of lipofuscin in RPEcan be assessed by quantitative measurement of FAF. However, the currentlyavailable FAF imaging technologies are not capable of quantifying the absoluteintensity of FAF, which is essential for comparing images from differentindividuals, and from the same individual over time. One major technicaldifficulty is to compensate the signal attenuation by ocular media anterior tothe RPE (pre-RPE media). FAF intensity is also influenced by fluctuations inimaging conditions such as illumination power and detector sensitivity, all ofwhich need to be compensated. In this review, we present the concept andresearch progress of using visible-light optical coherence tomography-basedsimultaneous multimodal retinal imaging to compensate signal attenuation bypre-RPE media and the influence of parameters of the acquisition system foraccurate measurement of FAF intensities.