Correlation of in vivo/ex vivo imaging of the posterior eye segment.

Background: For an understanding of the pathology of retinal diseases, direct comparisons of high-resolution in vivo retinal imaging and ex vivo histological preparations are desirable.
Material and Methods: Multimodal in vivo and ex vivo imaging of a human donor eye with secondary alterations showing atrophic retina due to central retinal arterial occlusion. The subsequent correlation with the histological examination was carried out on identical tissue localizations.
Results: Appropriate custom-built retinal imaging devices facilitate in vivo and ex vivo correlations and the examination of human eye tissue and acquisition of retinal images, e.g. SD-OCT. The precise alignment of the tissue enables a histological analysis on identical sites.
Conclusion: The direct correlation of clinical in vivo imaging with ex vivo imaging including histopathology can further enhance our understanding in the pathogenesis of retinal diseases; however, the proposed method is currently limited due to restricted availability of human donor tissue.
(© 2021. Springer Medizin Verlag GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature.)