Quantitative biometry of zebrafish retinal vasculature using optical coherence tomographic angiography

Abstract

The zebrafish is a robust model for studying human ophthalmic function and disease because of its fecundity, life-cycle, and similarities between its retinal structure and the human retina. Here, we demonstrate longitudinal in vivo imaging of retinal structure and, for the first time, noninvasive retinal vascular perfusion using optical coherence tomography (OCT) and OCT angiography (OCT-A) in zebrafish. In addition, we present methods for vascular segmentation and biometry to quantify retinal vessel length, branch angle, and curvature. We motivate retinal vascular biometry as a novel method for uniquely identifying zebrafish without the use of external markings and achieved 99.3% sensitivity and 99.9% specificity in a set of 200 longitudinal OCT/OCT-A datasets. The described methods enable quantitative analysis of vascular changes in zebrafish models of ophthalmic diseases and may broadly benefit large-scale zebrafish studies.