Retinal fluorescence microscopy in artificial ophthalmic environment: the Humanized Phantom Eye

Phantom eye devices are designed to mimic the optical properties of the human eye; however, the retinal structures are typically emulated with synthetic tissues. Thus, it is currently impossible to exploit phantom eye devices for fluorescence microscopy experiments on cultures, or ex-vivo tissues, although these ophthalmic measurements would be of importance for many applications such as the testing of retinal biomarkers. Here we report and describe the development of a phantom eye designed to host biological samples, such as retinal cultures differentiated from human induced pluripotent stem cells. We characterized the imaging performance of the humanized phantom eye on standard biomarkers such as Alexa Fluor 532 and Alexa fluor 594.