On 13 May, Dr. Ge Song from Duke University published a paper in Scientific Reports, showing that a novel retina scanning technology could be used to detect early retinal changes in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease (AD).
Recent technological advances have led to the development of non-invasive retinal imaging techniques such as Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), which uses a long-wavelength light source to generate high-resolution, 2D or 3D images of the retina. Studies now suggest that Alzheimer’s disease may be accompanied by changes in the retina, including deposition of amyloid plaque around the retinal nerve and altered retinal blood vessel structure. In this paper, Dr. Song and colleagues investigated whether angle-resolved low-coherence interferometry (a/LCI) guided by OCT can provide a more detailed and sensitive detection of retinal changes in transgenic mouse models of AD. Using these complementary methodsex vivo, the researchers hoped to extract both textural and structural information on the retina.
In their paper, Dr. Song and colleagues showed that complementing OCT with a/LCI enabled the simultaneous assessment of retinal structure and retinal thickness, providing sufficient resolution to visualise retinal texture in the different layers of the mouse retina. They observed significant differences in the structure of three retinal areas of AD mice compared to wild-type controls, which may be related to AD-associated plaque deposition. Further studies are now required to evaluate whether this technique works in thein vivoand clinical settings. The original Scientific Reports article can be found here: