How does it help in diagnosing eye diseases?
Everything your eye sees involves the retina, the delicate nerve tissue at the back of the eye that is responsible for receiving optical images. The retina can be affected by many disorders that involve the blood circulation in or under it, such as diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration. Therefore, learning about the retinal blood vessels is an important step in making an accurate diagnosis of any retinal disorder. An angiogram is a type of photograph of the retinal blood vessels that helps with these diagnoses. A fluorescein angiogram uses fluorescein dye; it does not use X-rays, radioactive materials, or iodine-based dyes, as do other types of angiograms. The fluorescein dye in the blood vessels allows them to be easily seen in the photographs, so the vessels can be identified and evaluated. Both the presence and absence of dye are clues as to diagnosis and treatment.
