Medical retina, focus on retinal imaging, Eds. Frank G. Holz and Richard Spaide, 2010, pp. 227, cloth, EUR 171.15, ISBN-13: 978-3-540-85539-2 Springer-Verlag

Excerpt

Before exploring the modern efficacious retinal imaging techniques described in Holtz and Spaide’s Medical Retina, Focus on Retinal Imaging, it is instructive to review some of their seminal antecedents. The mathematician Charles Babbage designed the first direct-view ophthalmoscope. Five years later, in 1850, Helmholtz developed a practical device to image the living retina in patients. Following the seminal inventions of Hermann von Helmholtz and Allvar Gullstrand, clinicians had access to instruments that were capable of imaging the anterior and the posterior regions of the eye. These instruments differ in design due to the different optics of the eye in the anterior and the posterior segments. In order to image the retina, it is necessary to illuminate the retina with a light source external to the eye; the light rays enter the eye, are transmitted through the pupil, the ocular lens, the vitreous, and are incident on the retina. The light scattered and reflected or emitted from retinal fluorescence must be transmitted through the vitreous, the ocular lens, the pupil, the aqueous, and the cornea to be detected by the eye of the observer or by an electronic light detector. In the absence of adaptive optics, the image of the retina will be affected by all of the aberrations of the eye. …