In vivo optical imaging of physiological responses to photostimulation in human photoreceptors

Noninvasive functional imaging of molecular and cellular processes of vision may have immense impact on research and clinical diagnostics. Although suitable intrinsic optical signals (IOSs) have been observed ex vivo and in immobilized animals in vivo, detecting IOSs of photoreceptor activity in living humans was cumbersome and time consuming. Here, we observed clear spatially and temporally resolved changes in the optical path length of the photoreceptor outer segment as a response to an optical stimulus in the living human eye. To witness these changes, we evaluated phase data obtained with a parallelized and computationally aberration-corrected optical coherence tomography system. The noninvasive detection of optical path length changes shows neuronal photoreceptor activity of single cones in living human retina, and therefore, it may provide diagnostic options in ophthalmology and neurology and could provide insights into visual phototransduction in humans.