Advances in retinal ganglion cell imaging

Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of blindness worldwide and will affect 79.6 million people worldwide by 2020. It is caused by the progressive loss of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), predominantly via apoptosis, within the retinal nerve fibre layer and the corresponding loss of axons of the optic nerve head. One of its most devastating features is its late diagnosis and the resulting irreversible visual loss that is often predictable. Current diagnostic tools require significant RGC or functional visual field loss before the threshold for detection of glaucoma may be reached. To propel the efficacy of therapeutics in glaucoma, an earlier diagnostic tool is required. Recent advances in retinal imaging, including optical coherence tomography, confocal scanning laser ophthalmoscopy, and adaptive optics, have propelled both glaucoma research and clinical diagnostics and therapeutics. However, an ideal imaging technique to diagnose and monitor glaucoma would image RGCs non-invasively with high specificity and sensitivity in vivo. It may confirm the presence of healthy RGCs, such as in transgenic models or retrograde labelling, or detect subtle changes in the number of unhealthy or apoptotic RGCs, such as detection of apoptosing retinal cells (DARC). Although many of these advances have not yet been introduced to the clinical arena, their successes in animal studies are enthralling. This review will illustrate the challenges of imaging RGCs, the main retinal imaging modalities, the in vivo techniques to augment these as specific RGC-imaging tools and their potential for translation to the glaucoma clinic.