Recently, a novel optical imaging technique was successfully used in measuring the functionalresponse of living retinal tissues. The technique, functional ultra high resolutionoptical coherence tomography, measures localized differential changes in the retina reflectivityover time resulting from external white light stimulation. This result can be used todevelop a non-invasive diagnostic method for the early detection of retinal diseases. However,the physiological causes of the experimentally observed optical signals, most of whichoriginate from the photoreceptors layer, are still not well understood. Due to the complexityof the photoreceptors, using purely experimental methods to isolate the changes inlight reflectivity corresponding to individual physiological processes is not feasible. Therefore,we have employed the finite-difference time-domain method to model the changes inlight scattering patterns of the photoreceptor cells caused by light-induced physiologicalprocesses. Processes such as cell swelling, cell elongation and hyperpolarization of doublelipidmembrane structures were simulated by changing the size parameters and opticalproperties of the cells components. Simulation results show that the hyperpolarization ofdouble-lipid membranous structures and cell swelling are the most likely causes for theexperimentally observed changes in optical reflectivity. A number of experiments weresuggested to verify the conclusions drawn from this numerical work. This numerical workincludes an analysis of various errors in FDTD computational models.
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Finite-Difference Time-Domain Simulations of Light Scattering from Retinal Photoreceptors
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