Quantification of retinal nerve fiber layer changes in optical coherence tomography images reveals differential progression of glaucomas

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• clustering
• disease progression
• glaucoma
• optical coherence tomography
• retinal nerve fiber layer phenotypes
• cosine distance