Quantification of retinal nerve fiber layer changes in optical coherence tomography images reveals differential progression of glaucomas
Saumyadipta Pyne1, Mohammad Hasnat Ali2, Meghana Aruru3, Harsha L Rao4
1 Department of Biostatistics, Public Health Dynamics Laboratory (PHDL), Graduate School of Public Health, Pittsburgh, PA, USA 2 Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, LV Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad, Telangana, India 3 Department of Pharmacy and Therapeutics, Program Evaluation and Research Unit, University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy, Pittsburgh, PA, USA 4 Department of Glaucoma, Narayana Nethralaya, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Correspondence Address:
Dr. Saumyadipta Pyne Department of Biostatistics, Graduate School of Public Health, A 718, Public Health, 130 De Soto Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15261 USA
 Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None  | Check |
DOI: 10.4103/bjhs.bjhs_74_19
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BACKGROUND: For monitoring the progression of glaucoma, a major cause of irreversible blindness, clinicians measure retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) changes in the eye.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: Based on a clinical cohort of patients, we computed the temporal differences in the RNFL patterns in their glaucomatous eyes using optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. To gain insights into disease progression, we quantified the precise changes in the RNFL clock-hour sector phenotypes in each glaucomatous eye between the first and second clinical visits.
CONCLUSION: Further, we identified 2 groups of patients using unsupervised clustering based only on their initial RNFL phenotypes, which may be investigated further to develop clinically useful models for prediction of glaucoma progression.
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