gms | German Medical Science

24th Annual Meeting of the German Retina Society

German Retina Society

17.06. - 18.06.2011, Aachen

Imaging the retina

Meeting Abstract

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  • Tos J. M. Berendschot - Maastricht

German Retina Society. 24th Annual Conference of the German Retina Society. Aachen, 17.-18.06.2011. Düsseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2011. Doc11rg01

doi: 10.3205/11rg01, urn:nbn:de:0183-11rg014

Published: June 15, 2011

© 2011 Berendschot.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.en). You are free: to Share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work, provided the original author and source are credited.


Outline

Text

In 1851 Helmholtz introduced the ophthalmoscope. The instrument allowed for the first time the observation of light reflected at the fundus in the living eye. The development of this device was one of the major advancements in medicine and in fact the birth of ophthalmology as a separate sub-specialism. For more than a century, the ophthalmoscope was the main diagnostic instrument for retinal disorders. Yet ophthalmoscopy allows only qualitative observation of the eye. With improvements in light detecting techniques and the advent of microprocessors, the challenging, quantitative assessment of the amount of light reflected by the fundus could be addressed. Thus, measuring the spectral and spatial distribution of the reflectance became feasible. This has resulted in a better understanding of the distribution of the macular pigment and the Stiles-Crawford effect and visualization of the oxygenation of the retinal vasculature. Further, in the last decades several new imaging techniques have emerged, like polarimetry, autofluorescence, optical coherence tomography and in vivo apoptose imaging that has increased our understanding of the functional morphology of the retina even further. In this talk all these techniques and their significance in retinal diseases will be shortly reviewed.