Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of irreversible blindness worldwide. The disease causes the loss of retinal nerve fibers (RNFs) and therefore visual field impairment. It is thought that in the early stages of glaucoma, before the loss of RNFs, the intracellular microtubules of the RNF axons disappear, altering the birefringent properties of the RNF-Layer (RNFL). In this study, we measured the birefringent properties of the RNFL using a polarization-sensitive OCT to compare glaucoma vs. healthy eyes. We observed a significantly reduced birefringence of the RNFL in glaucoma compared to healthy controls (0.090 ±0.009°/µm vs. 0.100 ±0.010°/µm, p<0.001).
Glaucoma is a chronic optic neuropathy that severely damages the optic nerve head. Accurate information about the nerve fiber bundle (RNFB) trajectories in the retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) can improve earlier diagnosis and monitoring. Using polarization-sensitive (PS) OCT volume data we propose a fully automatic method of tracing RNFB trajectories. Preliminary analysis of automatically constructed RNFB traces shows a higher concordance to manually performed traces in comparison to a purely mathematical model. On repeated measurements of the same eye they also provide a higher reproducibility than results delivered by different graders.
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