About

Dr. Stacey S. Choi joined The Ohio State University College of Optometry in July 2013 as an Associate Professor. Her research focuses on the clinical application of adaptive optics (AO) retinal imaging and retinal function to study various retinal and optic nerve diseases, aiming to enhance understanding of underlying disease mechanisms. She has contributed to numerous published abstracts in reputable journals such as Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science and Optometry and Vision Science, covering topics including AO retinal imaging, cone and rod photoreceptor visualization, retinal structure in disease states, and ocular parameters related to retinal and optic nerve health.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Optics
• Physics
• Ophthalmology
• Medicine
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer vision

Selected publications

• High-speed adaptive optics swept-source full-field OCT

  2026-01-16

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Examining retinal blood flow using a fast, line scanning adaptive optics ophthalmoscope

  2026-03-05

  articleSenior author

  Imaging the human retinal blood flow at the level of an individual capillary requires the use of adaptive optics (AO) to overcome ocular aberrations. Furthermore, to accurately capture the temporal dynamics, high speed imaging is also required. Here, a high-speed multi-line partially confocal scanning laser ophthalmoscope employing a digital micromirror device (DMD) is described. The DMD allows projection of multiple confocal lines at any direction and spacing and is coupled with the use of a high-speed two-dimensional complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor camera. The arrangement allows for the simultaneous acquisition of both the confocal and multiply scattered images. Blood vessel imaging results on human controls and those with primary open angle glaucoma are presented, including some initial results on vasodilation in response to flicker stimulation.

  PublisherDOI

• Reducing manual labeling requirements and improved retinal ganglion cell identification in 3D AO-OCT volumes using semi-supervised learning

  Biomedical Optics Express · 2024-06-26 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  Adaptive optics-optical coherence tomography (AO-OCT) allows for the three-dimensional visualization of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) in the living human eye. Quantitative analyses of RGCs have significant potential for improving the diagnosis and monitoring of diseases such as glaucoma. Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have made possible the automatic identification and analysis of RGCs within the complex three-dimensional retinal volumes obtained with such imaging. However, the current state-of-the-art ML approach relies on fully supervised training, which demands large amounts of training labels. Each volume requires many hours of expert manual annotation. Here, two semi-supervised training schemes are introduced, (i) cross-consistency training and (ii) cross pseudo supervision that utilize unlabeled AO-OCT volumes together with a minimal set of labels, vastly reducing the labeling demands. Moreover, these methods outperformed their fully supervised counterpart and achieved accuracy comparable to that of human experts.

  PublisherDOI

• Assessing the efficacy of 2D and 3D CNN algorithms in OCT-based glaucoma detection

  Scientific Reports · 2024-05-23 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access

  Glaucoma is a progressive neurodegenerative disease characterized by the gradual degeneration of retinal ganglion cells, leading to irreversible blindness worldwide. Therefore, timely and accurate diagnosis of glaucoma is crucial, enabling early intervention and facilitating effective disease management to mitigate further vision deterioration. The advent of optical coherence tomography (OCT) has marked a transformative era in ophthalmology, offering detailed visualization of the macula and optic nerve head (ONH) regions. In recent years, both 2D and 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithms have been applied to OCT image analysis. While 2D CNNs rely on post-prediction aggregation of all B-scans within OCT volumes, 3D CNNs allow for direct glaucoma prediction from the OCT data. However, in the absence of extensively pre-trained 3D models, the comparative efficacy of 2D and 3D-CNN algorithms in detecting glaucoma from volumetric OCT images remains unclear. Therefore, this study explores the efficacy of glaucoma detection through volumetric OCT images using select state-of-the-art (SOTA) 2D-CNN models, 3D adaptations of these 2D-CNN models with specific weight transfer techniques, and a custom 5-layer 3D-CNN-Encoder algorithm. The performance across two distinct datasets is evaluated, each focusing on the macula and the ONH, to provide a comprehensive understanding of the models' capabilities in identifying glaucoma. Our findings demonstrate that the 2D-CNN algorithm consistently provided robust results compared to their 3D counterparts tested in this study for glaucoma detection, achieving AUC values of 0.960 and 0.943 for the macular and ONH OCT test images, respectively. Given the scarcity of pre-trained 3D models trained on extensive datasets, this comparative analysis underscores the overall utility of 2D and 3D-CNN algorithms in advancing glaucoma diagnostic systems in ophthalmology and highlights the potential of 2D algorithms for volumetric OCT image-based glaucoma detection.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• High-speed, phase contrast retinal and blood flow imaging using an adaptive optics partially confocal multi-line ophthalmoscope

  Biomedical Optics Express · 2024-01-22 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access

  High-speed, phase contrast retinal and blood flow imaging using an adaptive optics partially confocal multi-line ophthalmosocope (AO-pcMLO) is described. It allows for simultaneous confocal and phase contrast imaging with various directional multi-line illumination by using a single 2D camera and a digital micromirror device (DMD). Both vertical and horizontal line illumination directions were tested, for photoreceptor and vascular imaging. The phase contrast imaging provided improved visualization of retinal structures such as cone inner segments, vessel walls and red blood cells with images being acquired at frame rates up to 500 Hz. Blood flow velocities of small vessels (<40 µ m in diameter) were measured using kymographs for capillaries and cross-correlation between subsequent images for arterioles or venules. Cardiac-related pulsatile patterns were observed with normal resting heart-beat rate, and instantaneous blood flow velocities from 0.7 to 20 mm/s were measured.

  PublisherDOI

• Quantitative Analysis of the Vasculature and Cone Photoreceptors in Subjects With Diabetes Without Diabetic Retinopathy

  Current Eye Research · 2024-02-26

  articleSenior author

  PURPOSE: To characterize any differences in the vasculature and cone photoreceptor packing geometry (CPG) between subjects with diabetes without/no diabetic retinopathy (NDR) and healthy controls. METHODS: Eight NDR and five controls were enrolled. Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) taken at the macula was used to measure vessel density, vessel length density, and vessel density index (VDI) in three vascular plexuses, namely, the superficial vascular plexus, intermediate capillary plexus, and deep capillary plexus (DCP). The choriocapillaris (CC) flow deficit (FD) was also measured. OCTA images were binarized and processed to extrapolate the parafovea and parafoveal quadrants and the OCTA indices mentioned above. The CC was processed with six different radii to quantify FD. Adaptive optics - scanning laser ophthalmoscopy images were acquired and processed to extract CPG indices, i.e., cone density (CD), cone-to-cone spacing (CS), linear dispersion index, heterogeneity packing index and percent of cells with six neighbors at 3.6° in the temporal retina. RESULTS: = 0.048). No other significant correlations were found. For OCTA or CPG indices, no significant differences were found between the cohorts in the parafovea or parafoveal quadrants. CONCLUSIONS: CS is the most sensitive CPG index for detecting alterations in the cone mosaic. The DCP and the cone photoreceptors are significantly correlated, indicating that alterations in the DCP can affect the cones. Future work elucidating the vascular alterations and neurodegeneration present in diabetic eyes should focus on the DCP and multiple CPG indices, not solely CD. Moreover, such alterations are highly localized, hence using larger regions e.g. parafovea versus smaller areas, such as the PTQ, will potentially mask significant correlations.

  PublisherDOI

• High-speed adaptive optics partially confocal ophthalmoscope based on Digital Micromirror Device (DMD)

  2023-03-15 · 1 citations

  article

  A high-speed adaptive optics (AO) partially-confocal ophthalmoscope using a digital micromirror device (DMD) and high-speed 2D CMOS camera is presented. The system allows for easy control of the trade-off between image acquisition rate and contrast by applying different illumination patterns on the DMD. The camera is synchronized with the DMD projecting multi-spot patterns on the human retina, which is pre-corrected by AO, for parallel scanning. Frame acquisition rates up to 250 fps was achieved this applying multi-spot scheme, with the contrast improving 2-3 fold compared to standard flood illumination. Partially confocal images of the human retina showed cone and rod photoreceptors over a range of retinal eccentricities.

  PublisherDOI

• Foveal cone loss in tamoxifen maculopathy: a case report

  Journal of Medical Case Reports · 2023-11-08 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  BACKGROUND: Tamoxifen is used in low dose concentrations (20-40 mg per day) as a therapy for breast cancer but is known to have ocular side effects. In this case report, the foveal cone integrity in a tamoxifen-treated patient who complained of a small central scotoma in the left eye while reading was examined using high resolution adaptive optics imaging. CASE PRESENTATION: Both eyes of a 54-year-old Caucasian, non-hispanic female who had been treated with tamoxifen for 1.5 years were examined using various imaging modalities including fundus photography, fundus autofluorescence, fluorescein angiography, spectral-domain optical coherence tomography, and adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy. Clinical spectral-domain optical coherence tomography showed a very small disruption to the photoreceptor layer at the fovea in the left eye only. However, adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy imaging revealed foveal cone loss in both eyes, but to a lesser extent in the right eye. Inner retinal changes were not observed in either eye. CONCLUSION: The area of cone loss was similar in size to a single newsprint letter when projected onto the retina, matching the patient's description of a scotoma in the left eye. Given the isolated loss of foveal cone photoreceptors with the absence of previously reported inner retinal and vascular changes, our results may indicate the earliest retinal changes associated with tamoxifen retinopathy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• HIGH-RESOLUTION IMAGING OF THE OUTER RETINA IN TYPE 2 ACUTE MACULAR NEURORETINOPATHY

  Retinal Cases & Brief Reports · 2023-03-30 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to investigate the outer retinal changes in a patient with type 2 acute macular neuroretinopathy (AMN). METHODS: A 35-year-old White woman complaining of a unilateral blind spot was imaged using various retinal imaging modalities including clinical optical coherence tomography (OCT), OCT-angiography, fundus fluorescein angiography, and adaptive optics (AO). RESULTS: Fundus examination revealed multiple paracentral reddish brown petaloid lesions in the symptomatic left eye, while the other eye was unremarkable. Clinical OCT showed areas of hyperreflectance at the outer plexiform layer/outer nuclear layer complex with a disrupted inner/outer segment junction, which are characteristic features of type 2 AMN. AO imaging further revealed either shortening or absence of cone outer segments within the AMN lesions attributing to the darker features observed in the en face images from fundus photography and scanning laser ophthalmoscopy. CONCLUSION: The AO findings indicate that the petaloid lesions in type 2 AMN are caused by a combination of the shortening and absence of the outer segment in individual cone photoreceptors.

  PublisherDOI

• Programmable, high-speed, adaptive optics partially confocal multi-spot ophthalmoscope using a digital micromirror device

  Optics Letters · 2023 · 14 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Optics
  • Computer Science

  A high-speed, adaptive optics partially confocal multi-spot ophthalmoscope (AO-pcMSO) using a digital micromirror device (DMD) in the illumination channel and a fast 2D CMOS camera is described. The camera is synchronized with the DMD allowing projection of multiple, simultaneous AO-corrected spots onto the human retina. Spatial filtering on each raw retinal image before reconstruction works as an array virtual pinholes. A frame acquisition rate of 250 fps is achieved by applying this parallel projection scheme. The contrast improves by 2-3 fold when compared to a standard flood illumination architecture. Partially confocal images of the human retina show cone and rod photoreceptors over a range of retinal eccentricities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• John S. Werner

  University of Lusaka

  74 shared

• Robert J. Zawadzki

  University of California, Davis

  74 shared

• Nathan Doble

  The Ohio State University

  62 shared

• Elaine M. Wells-Gray

  33 shared

• Susanna S. Park

  University of California, Davis

  28 shared

• Steven Truong

  27 shared

• John L. Keltner

  University of California, Davis

  21 shared

• Léonardo Blanco

  Ollscoil na Gaillimhe – University of Galway

  19 shared

Labs

• Research | College of OptometryPI

Education

• Ph.D., Optometry

  The Ohio State University

  2005

• M.S., Optometry

  The Ohio State University

  2001

• B.S., Optometry

  The Ohio State University

  1999