title: Recent Clinical Applications of Laser Speckle Flowgraphy in Eyes with Retinal Disease.
abstract: Retinal diseases related to ischemia, such as diabetic retinopathy, are the main cause of blindness worldwide. However, the pathogenesis of these diseases remains unclear, as does the time course of associated changes in ocular blood flow. Laser speckle flowgraphy (LSFG), which uses the laser speckle phenomenon to detect and quantify ocular circulation, is a promising candidate for a noninvasive method to measure ocular blood flow in living eyes. A recently developed LSFG measurement parameter, mean blur rate (MBR), can serve as a quantitative and reproducible index of retinal blood cell velocity. Mean blur rate can be used in the study of retinal diseases to evaluate microcirculation in the retinal vessels, choroid, and optic nerve head. In addition to overall MBR (MA), LSFG measurements of optic nerve head microcirculation can be divided into vessel-area MBR (MV) and tissue-area MBR (MT). Absolute values for MT have been shown to be linearly correlated with capillary blood flow, regardless of fundus pigmentation. Recently, there has been an increasing number of reports on the clinical applications of LSFG in retinal disease.
authors.affiliation: From the Departments of *Ophthalmology, †Retinal Disease Control, and ‡Advanced Ophthalmic Medicine, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan.
authors.forename: Hiroshi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kunikata
authors.forename: Toru
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Nakazawa
mesh_terms: D001783:Blood Flow Velocity / Q000502:physiology; D001794:Blood Pressure / Q000502:physiology; D002829:Choroid / Q000098:blood supply; D005123:Eye / Q000098:blood supply*; D006439:Hemodynamics / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D017078:Laser-Doppler Flowmetry / Q000379:methods*; D008833:Microcirculation / Q000502:physiology; D009898:Optic Disk / Q000098:blood supply; D012039:Regional Blood Flow / Q000502:physiology*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012164:Retinal Diseases / Q000503:physiopathology*; D012171:Retinal Vessels / Q000502:physiology*