COMPARISON BETWEEN THREE NON-INVASIVE TECHNIQUES OF EVALUATION MICROVASCULAR MORPHOLOGY VS. THE GOLD-STANDARD LOCALLY INVASIVE MICROMYOGRAPHY. PRELIMINARY DATA

Objective: The evaluation of the morphological characteristics of small resis-tance arteries in human beings in not easy. The gold standard is generally consid-ered to be the evaluation of the media to lumen ratio (M/L) of subcutaneous small vessels obtained by local biopsies and evaluated by wire or pressure micromyiog-raphy. However, non-invasive techniques for the evaluation of retinal arterioles were recently proposed, in particular two approaches seem to provide interesting information: scanning laser Doppler fl owmetry (SLDF) and adaptive optics (AO); both of them provide an estimation of the wall to lumen ratio (WLR) of retinal arterioles. A non-invasive measurement of basal and total capillary density may be obtained by videomicroscopy/capillaroscopy. No direct comparison of the three non-invasive techniques in the same population was previously performed, in par-ticular AO was never validated against micromyography.