Pharmacokinetic interpretation of vitreous fluorophotometry.

Vitreous fluorophotometry is producing an increasing amount of clinical and experimental data. In order to interpret these data and obtain quantitative values for the permeability of the blood ocular barriers, there is a need to understand better the basic phenomena governing the transport of fluorescein. We present here a refined mathematical model that we use to interpret a large body of clinical data yielding values for the inward (6.9 x 10(-6) cm/min) and outward (210 x 10(-6) cm/min) posterior permeability coefficients, the effective diffusion coefficient in the vitreous (8 x 10(-4) cm2/min), and the plasma fluorescein decay constants (1.17, 0.34, and 0.044 per hour). Moreover, we utilize the model to make predictions related to kinetic vitreous fluorophotometry and to the reliability of the procedure to calculate the permeability coefficients.