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The next time you go for your annual eye checkup, chances are your eye doctor will recommend retinal imaging. This is an additional eye exam that many ophthalmologists are now carrying out. This helps improve the detailed eye exam.
Adding retinal imaging to your eye test may be necessary if you have some conditions. These conditions include diabetes, glaucoma, or age-related macular degeneration. But even if you do not have these eye conditions, retinal imaging can detect severe eye illnesses early and help you protect your vision.
Retinal imaging or a retinal photograph is a surgery-free and totally safe technique of taking pictures of the back of your eye or retina. The technique allows your eye doctor to have a closer look at your retina, blood vessels, and optic nerve.
There are a few different types of retinal imaging that your eye doctor can use to examine your eye. They include optical coherence tomography (OCT), angiography, and fundus photography. Each of these methods has precise benefits to detecting certain problems in your eye. Your eye doctor will determine the best technique for your specific condition.
Retinal imaging uses low-power lasers to take digital pictures of your retina. The light produced by the lasers goes onto your eye through the pupil. As the light passes through to the retina, it leaves images that are collected by a machine, creating a detailed picture of the retina.
Your eye doctor then looks at these pictures to check what information your retina is revealing about the health of your eye, body, and brain.
Clearer images of the retina make it easier for your ophthalmologist to teach you about your eye health and wellness. You can look at the retinal pictures together and your doctor can identify the different parts of the retina. Then he or she will explain the eye conditions that the pictures reveal and suggest suitable treatment options.
Retinal imaging can reveal the following eye conditions.
Diabetic retinopathy – Diabetes can hurt the blood vessels in your retina and cause vision loss if not treated.
Glaucoma – This condition causes a buildup of fluid that can damage your optic nerve and cause irreversible vision loss.
Age-macular degeneration – This illness that comes with age can cause blood or fluid to leak into your retina and make your vision blurry.
Cancer – A dark spot in your retina may indicate a melanoma. Melanoma can grow inside your retina without being detected. If detected early, the melanoma can be treated before it causes severe damage and spread to other parts of the body.
Retinal detachment – Retinas can withdraw from the wall of your eye and cause permanent loss of vision if not treated properly.
High blood pressure – Symptoms of high blood pressure usually appear first in the retina. Signs can include thinning of the retinal blood vessels, spots, or bleeding in the retina.
For more on how retinal imaging works and why it is important, visit Brandon Eyes at our offices in Middleton or Madison, Wisconsin. You can call (608) 833-7256 or tel:6088330301(608) 833-0301 today to book an appointment.
Retinal imaging is a non-invasive & completely safe method of obtaining pictures of the back of the eye.
What is retinal imaging?
Light from very low-power lasers or a camera flash enters the eye through the pupil. Light reflected back leaves the same way to be collected by the machine creating an image of the retina. Similar types of imaging are performed at a high street optician for a standard eye health check-up. However, we analyse these images in more detail to see what other information they could reveal about the health of human body and brain.
What it used for?
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The back of the eye is called the retina and is one of the few places in the human body allowing easy observation of blood vessels and nerves. These anatomical structures are shared with the brain, but where they are much less accessible. We are researching how we can use information from images of the retina to understand what is happening in the brain.
Subtle changes in the retina may reflect similar processes happening and these early signs may precede declining brain health by years or even decades. Studying blood vessels in the eye is also useful in detecting and understanding diseases that affect the human circulatory system such as high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease.
For example, with further research, we may soon be able to identify people with undiagnosed high blood pressure through pictures of their retina, thus enabling a doctor to prescribe appropriate medication and considerably reduce their risk of having a future heart attack or stroke.
Retinal imaging can be used to see:
Blood vessels that lie close to the surface as well as those that are located deeper in the retina
The optic nerve head where blood vessels and nerves enter and leave the eye
The different cellular layers which contain nerves and axons
The macular, which is the part of our eye responsible for central vision
For more information, please visit Retinal Camera.