Optophysiological Characterisation of Inner Retina Responses with High-Resolution Optical Coherence Tomography

Low coherence laser interferometry has revolutionised quantitative biomedical imaging of optically transparent structures at cellular resolutions. We report the first optical recording of neuronal excitation at cellular resolution in the inner retina by quantifying optically recorded stimulus-evoked responses from the retinal ganglion cell layer and comparing them with an electrophysiological standard. We imaged anaesthetised paralysed tree shrews, gated image acquisition, and used numerical filters to eliminate noise arising from retinal movements during respiratory and cardiac cycles. We observed increases in contrast variability in the retinal ganglion cell layer and nerve fibre layer with flash stimuli and gratings. Regions of interest were subdivided into three-dimensional patches (up to 5–15 μm in diameter) based on response similarity. We hypothesise that these patches correspond to individual cells, or segments of blood vessels within the inner retina. We observed a close correlation between the patch optical responses and mean electrical activity of the visual neurons in afferent pathway. While our data suggest that optical imaging of retinal activity is possible with high resolution OCT, the technical challenges are not trivial.