UC Berkeley

Robust, sensitive measures of foveal health and cone loss, particularly ones that rely on structural measures rather than subjective and time consuming psychophysical measures, could facilitate measurement of disease progression. The research described in this document uses multimodal high-resolution imaging techniques to study the relationship between structure of cone photoreceptors and visual function in both healthy and diseased eyes. Visualizing cone structure in living eyes offers a way to detect and monitor retinal disease and assess the health of cone photoreceptors. It is generally the case that regions that lack normal reflections from the photoreceptors correspond to regions that lack functional cones. However, areas of hyporeflective cones (cones that reflect significantly less than normal) even over large areas have been reported to have function, and these are defined as dysflective cones. The research described in this document focuses on determining the presence of these dysflective cones in healthy subjects, the timeline of dysflective cone reflectivity changes, and the sensitivity differences between healthy appearing cones and dysflective cones. Healthy dysflective cones were found to have similar function to surrounding areas, while dysflective areas in participants with retinal disease were found to have worse function, elevated thresholds, compared to surrounding areas.