Towards real time speckle controlled retinal photocoagulation

Katharina Bliedtner, Eric Seifert, Leoni Stockmann, Lisa Effe, Ralf Brinkmann

Abstract

Photocoagulation is a laser treatment widely used for the therapy of several retinal diseases. Intra- and inter-individual variations of the ocular transmission, light scattering and the retinal absorption makes it impossible to achieve a uniform effective exposure and hence a uniform damage throughout the therapy. A real-time monitoring and control of the induced damage is highly requested. Here, an approach to realize a real time optical feedback using dynamic speckle analysis is presented. A 532 nm continuous wave Nd:YAG laser is used for coagulation. During coagulation, speckle dynamics are monitored by a coherent object illumination using a 633nm HeNe laser and analyzed by a CMOS camera with a frame rate up to 1 kHz. It is obvious that a control system needs to determine whether the desired damage is achieved to shut down the system in a fraction of the exposure time. Here we use a fast and simple adaption of the generalized difference algorithm to analyze the speckle movements. This algorithm runs on a FPGA and is able to calculate a feedback value which is correlated to the thermal and coagulation induced tissue motion and thus the achieved damage. For different spot sizes (50-200 μm) and different exposure times (50-500 ms) the algorithm shows the ability to discriminate between different categories of retinal pigment epithelial damage ex-vivo in enucleated porcine eyes. Furthermore in-vivo experiments in rabbits show the ability of the system to determine tissue changes in living tissue during coagulation.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationOphthalmic Technologies XXVI
VolumeVolume 9693
PublisherSPIE
Publication date05.04.2016
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 05.04.2016
EventOphthalmic Technologies XXVI - San Francisco, United States
Duration: 13.02.201618.02.2016

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