Retinal Vasculature

Retinal Vasculature

Playing around with some data today and this image of retinal vasculature or the blood vessels in the retina at the back of an eye came out of it.  Pretty happy with the results.

Not many posts this month in Jonesblog as things have been pretty busy.  That combined with catching the flu/bad cold/pneumonia really knocked me down for over a week.  At one point, I slept for pretty much two days straight, felt better then followed that up with a quick out of town photo gig, I am now back at it.

 

 

15 Replies to “Retinal Vasculature”

  1. Wow, this is really neat. Is that the retina on the left?

    I’ve always wondered if the body is a little chronically undertuned as far as bloodflow goes. Like, could most of our tissues be a little healthier if they got a little bit more perfusion/flow? Hard to say, perhaps.

    1. The retina is the whole thing, but is kinda invisible in this image. What you are seeing is the blood vessels *within* the retina.

      I suspect that blood flow in the body is pretty much optimized to whatever task is at hand. When you get reduced blood flow, that is a pathological condition that the body responds to sometimes by creating new blood vessels.

      1. This is leveraged in at least one early-detection-of-cancer technique I’m familiar with. Tumors, even at an early stage, suck blood like nobody’s business.

        1. Yeah, *some* forms of cancer respond by encouraging blood vessel growth to supply a growing mass. Other forms of cancer grow so quickly that they rapidly exhaust their blood supply, and others still are not well organized and highly metastatic, breaking off pieces that go elsewhere in the body to start new cancer loci.

  2. So what’s the difference between the green and the purple ones here? I assume that at the left where everything comes together, that’s the connection at the back of the eyeball going to the brain? Looks really nice.

    1. Ah, the magenta and green signals come from how deep the vasculature is. Deeper vasculature is magenta, the more superficial vasculature is green. Yeah, everything comes out of the optic nerve head portion of the eye and drains through the same general location through the retinal veins.

  3. Nice! I assume this is cSLO angiography from the Spectralis. Is the image a composite from multiple focal points, or did you engineer something to delineate vasculature in some way. Close inspection looks like you applied some edge detection like a Sobel filter. Regardless, I like it. Just looking to learn a little more. I hope that doesn’t destroy the beauty/mystery aspect of it.

    1. Hey Kris! Nice to hear from you. Turns out that this was not cSLO angiography, but something a bit more pedestrian. A series of focus stacked images done entirely optically. But you are absolutely correct about the Sobel.

      The most fun is when you try and disassemble other images. Figure out how they are made.

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