Abstract

We assessed the agreement between sampling windows of different size and orientation on packing density estimates in images of the parafoveal cone mosaic. Two retinal locations along the horizontal meridian were imaged with a flood-illumination adaptive optics (AO) retinal camera in one eye of ten healthy subjects. Horizontal and vertical oriented sampling windows of different size (320×160 µm, 160×80 µm and 80×40 µm) were selected in each location. On average, the absolute differences between the estimates of cone density of different sampling window conditions were ≤10%. Although the differences were not statistically significant, the different sampling window conditions could not be used interchangeably, except for the vertical oriented windows of 320×160 µm and 160×80 µm. The graphical representation of the preferred packing arrangements of cones by Voronoi tiles was slightly affected by window size and orientation. The results illustrated the high importance of specifying the size and orientation of the sampling window used to derive cone metric estimates to facilitate comparison of different studies.

© 2013 Optical Society of America