Quantitative biometry of zebrafish retinal vasculature using optical coherence tomographic angiography

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 using optical coherence tomography (OCT) and noninvasive retinal vascular perfusion imaging using OCT angiography (OCT-A) in zebrafish. In addition, we present methods for retinal vascular segmentation and biometry to quantify vessel branch length, curvature, and angle. We further motivate retinal vascular biometry as a novel method for noninvasive zebrafish identification and demonstrated 99.9% accuracy for uniquely identifying eyes from a set of 200 longitudinal OCT/OCT-A volumes. The described methods enable the quantitative analysis of the vascular changes in zebrafish models of ophthalmic diseases and may broadly benefit large-scale zebrafish studies.