Ocular laser exposures resulting in damage at the retina typically involve cellular alterations in the retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) layer. To provide guidelines for eye-safe exposure to lasers, the laser safety community has relied on damage assessment in nonhuman primate studies. Simple and reliable model systems for laser bioeffects that use cultured RPE cells, rather than animals, are thus desirable. We have characterized our artificially pigmented hTERT-RPE I model by ...
A series of experiments in a new animal model for retinal damage, cynomolgus monkeys (Macaca fascicularis), have been conducted to determine the damage threshold for 12.5-nanosecond laser exposures at 1064 nm. These results provide a direct comparison to threshold values obtained in rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta), which is the model historically used in establishing retinal maximum permissible exposure (MPE) limits. In this study, the irradiance level of a collimated Gaussian ...
Precise targeting of retinal structures including retinal pigment epithelial cells, feeder vessels, ganglion cells, photoreceptors, and other cells important for light transduction may enable earlier disease intervention with laser therapies and advanced methods for vision studies. A novel imaging system based upon scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO) with adaptive optics (AO) and active image stabilization was designed, developed, and tested in humans and animals. An additional port allows delivery of aberration-corrected ...