Professor William Swanson and professor Stephen Burns of the IU School of Optometry will use their work to collaboratively develop better methods of diagnosing and assessing the progression of glaucoma, according to the press release.
Swanson, whose lab currently works in neural modeling and visual psychophysics, will lead the collaboration. Burns’ lab makes improvements on diagnostic imaging of ?retinas.
The team said it hopes to use high resolution imaging data to measure the loss of ganglion cells in the retinal nerve fiber layer, according to an IU press ?release.
The retinal nerve fiber is the layer of nerve fibers of the retina in the back of the eye that becomes the optic nerve, according to the ?release.
Swanson and Burns plan to measure the entire structure of the layer in order to help with their research of new treatments.
Currently, the loss of ganglion cells is measured by the thickness of the retinal nerve fiber layer, but this leads to problems because fiber layers can vary greatly among any given age group of healthy people, Swanson said in a press release.
“That makes it difficult to detect early stages of the disease from what is often seen as normal variability in healthy people,” Swanson said in the press release. “What we are doing that is new is measuring the entire structure of the retinal nerve fiber layer, which is less variable from subject to subject.”
Also, glaucoma is measured with perimetry, which quantifies visual sensitivity determined at certain locations of the visual field.
But if the chosen locations aren’t the areas of the eye that are damaged, it can go undiscovered, Swanson said in the press release.
“Our goal is that the doctor will be able to take a picture of the back of the eye showing where the retinal nerve fiber layer structure is abnormal,” Swanson said in the release. “That image could then be used to guide the doctor to test corresponding locations with perimetry.”
Suzanne Grossman
