Interdisciplinary Initiatives Program Round 2 – 2002

Daniel Palanker, Ophthalmology
George Shuele, no longer at Stanford
Mark Blumenkranz, Ophthalmology
Michael Marmor, Ophthalmology
Lev Perelman, no longer at Stanford

Retinal photo-therapies are among the most widespread applications of lasers in medicine. For optimization of the treatments and limiting the collateral retinal damage, it is highly desirable to measure the retinal temperature during the procedure.

In this work we introduce a non-invasive technique for monitoring the temperature-induced sub-cellular transformations. We demonstrate that the Light Scattering Spectroscopy allows for extracting information about the sizes, concentrations and refractive indices of the cellular organelles based on their back-scattering spectra. We apply this method for monitoring the metabolic activity of particular organelles in the retinal pigment epithelial cells under thermal stress. Light scattering spectroscopy opens a novel approach to studying the effects of various stress factors in living tissue on a level of cellular organelles.