Research-grade OCT: what new can it reveal about photoreceptors?

摘要

The recent commercialization of spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) has provided the vision research community with unprecedented imaging capabilities in turn-key form. These commercial systems are being applied to a plethora of ocular applications and have become highly popular. The shear success of the commercial form raises obvious questions about the virtue of research-grade OCT systems in conducting vision research. Here I will present several examples in which research-grade systems, developed in our Indiana laboratory, have provided fundamental information about the photoreceptor layer not attainable with current commercial systems. These examples required extending the performance capabilities of SD-OCT in the areas of directional sensitivity, polarization sensitivity, and lateral resolution.