Evaluating human rod photoreceptor function using pixelwise intensity-based optoretinography

More than 50 inherited retinal diseases are known, with rod photoreceptors serving as early indicators in nearly half of them. Given that current clinical imaging modalities cannot resolve the loss of individual rods, rod optoretinograms hold unique promise for transforming the early detection and precise monitoring of retinal disease. They provide a powerful means of detecting early functional changes in diseases marked by rod degeneration, such as Retinitis Pigmentosa, conditions like Age-related Macular Degeneration and certain forms of night blindness, where rod mosaics remain structurally intact, but physiologically impaired. The “optoretinogram” is a relatively new assay that operates through detection of optical changes in cells in response to stimuli. This tool has excellent potential for providing insights into the earliest functional changes of individual photoreceptors, with the potential to assist in the early detection, monitoring, and treatment of retinal diseases.

In this work, we obtained intensity-based optoretinograms (iORGs) from rod photoreceptors using an adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscope. We explore the necessity of both individual rod identification for extracting these waveforms and discuss rod iORG RMS morphology in the context of previously reported cone iORGs.

We found that human rod iORG RMS waveforms have slower implicit times and lower amplitudes than cone iORG RMS waveforms. Additionally, we determined that we obtain very similar iORG RMS metrics using either only rod locations or all pixels where rods reside. The ability to obtain rod optoretinograms without counting individual rods greatly simplifies the functional evaluation of rods and makes the approach more practical and scalable for larger populations and diseased retina.