FOVEA: a new program to standardize the measurement of foveal pit morphology

PeerJ

article

Bret A. Moore¹  Innfarn Yoo²  Luke P. Tyrrell¹  Bedrich Benes²  Esteban Fernandez-Juricic¹ 

[1] Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University;Department of Computer Graphics Technology, Purdue University

关键词: Fovea;    Retina;    Foveal pit;    Comparative studies;   

DOI  :  10.7717/peerj.1785

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Inra

【 摘 要 】

The fovea is one of the most studied retinal specializations in vertebrates, which consists of an invagination of the retinal tissue with high packing of cone photoreceptors, leading to high visual resolution. Between species, foveae differ morphologically in the depth and width of the foveal pit and the steepness of the foveal walls, which could influence visual perception. However, there is no standardized methodology to measure the contour of the foveal pit across species. We present here FOVEA, a program for the quantification of foveal parameters (width, depth, slope of foveal pit) using images from histological cross-sections or optical coherence tomography (OCT). FOVEA is based on a new algorithm to detect the inner retina contour based on the color variation of the image. We evaluated FOVEA by comparing the fovea morphology of two Passerine birds based on histological cross-sections and its performance with data from previously published OCT images. FOVEA detected differences between species and its output was not significantly different from previous estimates using OCT software. FOVEA can be used for comparative studies to better understand the evolution of the fovea morphology in vertebrates as well as for diagnostic purposes in veterinary pathology. FOVEA is freely available for academic use and can be downloaded at: http://estebanfj.bio.purdue.edu/fovea.

【 授权许可】

CC BY