DFG grants funding to quantify ocular blood flow
The German research foundation provides support to the Pattern Recognition Lab’s ophthalmic imaging group, led by Stefan Ploner, in the amount of more than a quarter million Euro, over a 30-month funding period.
With this meanwhile third grant, DFG continues to strengthen a long standing collaboration in OCT(A) motion correction and signal reconstruction between the pattern recognition lab at FAU, led by Prof. Andreas Maier; the Biomedical Optical Imaging and Biophotonics group at MIT, led by the inventor of OCT, Prof. James Fujimoto; and clinicians at the New England Eye Center, led by retinal specialist Prof. Nadia Waheed.
In this new project, we will merge two of our major research directions, bringing together retinal blood flow quantification (Ploner et al., Retina, 2016) and OCT motion correction (Kraus et al., BOEx, 2014; Ploner et al., MICCAI, 2022). Compared to classic static 3D OCTA vasculature analysis, we will develop methods for eye motion-corrected 4D (time-resolved 3D) flow quantification in the retinal microvasculature.
These advances promise to provide new markers of disease at earlier stages, enable more accurate measurement of disease progression and response to therapy in pharmaceutical studies, and help elucidate pathogenesis in vision-threatening retinal disease, such as glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, and age-related macular degeneration.
Further information:
Stefan Ploner, M.Sc.
https://lme.tf.fau.de/person/ploner