Imaging outer segment renewal in living human cone photoreceptors.

In vertebrate eyes, vision begins when the photoreceptor's outer segment absorbs photons and generates a neural signal destined for the brain. The extreme optical and metabolic demands of this process of phototransduction necessitate continual renewal of the outer segment. Outer segment renewal has been long studied in post-mortem rods using autoradiography, but has been observed neither in living photoreceptors nor directly in cones. Using adaptive optics, which permits the resolution of cones, and temporally coherent illumination, which transforms the outer segment into a "biological interferometer," we observed cone renewal in three subjects, manifesting as elongation of the cone outer segment, with rates ranging from 93 to 113 nm/hour (2.2 to 2.7 microm/day). In one subject we observed renewal occurring over 24 hours, with small but significant changes in renewal rate over the day. We determined that this novel method is sensitive to changes in outer segment length of 139 nm, more than 20 times better than the axial resolution of ultra-high resolution optical coherence tomography, the best existing method for depth imaging of the living retina.

Imaging cone photoreceptors in three dimensions and in time using ultrahigh resolution optical coherence tomography with adaptive optics.

Cone photoreceptors in the living human eye have recently been imaged with micron-scale resolution in all three spatial dimensions using adaptive optics optical coherence tomography. While these advances have allowed non-invasive study of the three-dimensional structure of living human cones, studies of their function and physiology are still hampered by the difficulties to monitor the same cells over time. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the feasibility of cone monitoring using ultrahigh-resolution adaptive optics optical coherence tomography. Critical to this is incorporation of a high speed CMOS camera (125 KHz) and a novel feature-based, image registration/dewarping algorithm for reducing the deleterious effects of eye motion on volume images. Volume movies were acquired on three healthy subjects at retinal eccentricities from 0.5° to 6°. Image registration/dewarping reduced motion artifacts in the movies from 15 µm to 1.3 µm root mean square, the latter sufficient for identifying and tracking cones. Cone row-to-row spacing and outer segment lengths were consistent with that reported in the literature. Cone length analysis demonstrates that UHR-AO-OCT is sufficiently sensitive to measure real length differences between cones in the same 0.5° retinal patch, and requires no more than five measurements of OS length to achieve 95% confidence. We know of no other imaging modality that can monitor foveal or parafoveal cones over time with comparable resolution in all three dimensions.