ARVO 2025: Adaptive optics imaging of AMD

At ARVO 2025, in Salt Lake City, Utah, Yuhua Zhang, PhD, talked about his presentation on in vivo imaging of retinal pigment epithelium metabolic function in age-related macular degeneration

Video Transcript:

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Yuhua Zhang, PhD:

Hi. My name is Yuhua Zhang. I'm a professor of ophthalmology at the Department of Ophthalmology UCLA. I'm a principal investigator at the advanced imaging lab of the Doheny Eye Institute. At this ARVO, I'm very excited to present our recent development in adaptive optics, high resolution fluorescence lifetime imaging of ophthalmoscopy. This is a brand new instrument. It can image directly one of the most important cells that name the retinal pigment epithelium, shortened as RPE cells. These cells support the critical visual component named the photoreceptor. These cells transduct the light into visual signal. Age-related macular degeneration is a disease that attacks these cells.

Currently clinical instruments available in the market, most of them don't have the imaging ability to directly image these cells. In my lab, we develop adaptive optics that enhance the retinal imaging. We can direct the imaging the photoreceptor cells, and now we cannot directly image the RPE cells, not only the cell structure. That means we can know they are there. More importantly, we know how they are functioning, because precision medicine is a bigger goal. You're treating the AMD using the personalized treatment. So the retinal imaging definitely can play a critical role in this mission. So the goal in my lab is that we want to develop the RPE cells function and with a broad field of view with a short imaging time, and we can move it outside of the lab, put into the clinic. And also, we are going to build the most of the more advanced instruments to directly image the retina's blood supply tissue, the choroid.

That's a bigger goal in my life. The bigger data, that's a very important that's you really can know, from a broader scope, we know the disease the pathogenesis, how the disease progresses on the overall human kind, how did it can be treated. But if we come back to individuals, because of the individual eye's properties, so the retinal imaging definitely can provide the most precise diagnosis at this individual level. For example, retinal imaging, particularly for the adaptive optic imaging we are doing, that it's not at this stage. It's not like the general instrument. It can image the patient, but it's really a living microscope. It's the same thing if we compare the clinical instrument like a microscope, actually the adaptive optic retinal imaging represented the electron microscope that is a truly provided the ultra structure function at the cell level and even to molecular level.

That truly provides the insight into the underlying pathogenesis, the mechanism by which the disease really attacks the photoreceptor, and it's a supporting system. So to speak, in such a microscopy provided a fundamental understanding of the disease mechanism. It's can better serve the bigger data on the on country, on reverse direction. The dig data really gives us a direction to do to put the disease the microscope.