The Kowa FM-700 is an aqueous flare meter with a slit-lamp design. Even in cases of corneal inflammation, anyone with slit lamp experience will find the alignment process intuitively easy. It is also applicable for monitoring patients post cataract surgery and for testing ocular inflammatory diseases such as uveitis.
An area including the measurement window is scanned with a laser beam. Background signal 1 (BG1) is obtained when the laser beam is located below the measurement window and background signal 2 (BG2) is obtained when the laserbeam is located above the measurement window. Both are scattered light noise from intraocular tissue, whilst the flare signal (SIG) is a sum of scattered light from protein and scattered light noise from intraocular tissue.
Thus, the intensity of the scattered light caused by the protein concentration in the aqueous humor of the anterior chamber is calculated using the formula: SIG-(BG1+BG2)/2. The result obtained from using this formula is called ‘flare value Eand represented as photon count per millisecond.
