Fundus-Vascular Responses to Color Deviation Caused by Non-Oxidative Blue Filtering

Short-wavelength blue light damaged retina by the oxidative stress in the retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells. Filtering blue light from screen could reduce blue hazard, whereas it inevitably altered color-gamut coverage and color-deviation level. Although abnormal fundus-vascular density (FVD) sometimes indicated fundus disease, few researchers noticed its responses to the variation of color-gamut coverage and color-deviation level.

In this study, we performed cellular experiments and analyzed the RPE cell viabilities (CVs) in spectrums with different blue (455-475 nm) ratios to describe the corresponding oxidative-stress levels. Further, we investigated the effects of color-gamut and deviation on FVD variations during the screen-watching task using human factor experiments with 30 participants (university students, including 17 males and 13 females, 21 to 30 years old).

RPE CVs were similar in different spectrums, implying that non-oxidative blue filtering hardly contributed to CV improvement. Color-deviation level seems to induce more significant effects on the visual function compared to color-gamut coverage, and MTF and FVD presents similar variation trends during the visual task.

Oxidative-free blue filtering contributed little to decrease retinal oxidative stress yet caused color-deviation increase, which caused significant FVD reduction.