FEATURE Glaucoma is a progressive eye disease and the leading cause of blindness. However, patients often do not realise they have it until it reaches an advanced stage. Screenings of public housing residents in Hong Kong aged 50 and above found the prevalence as high as seven per cent―yet most were unaware of their glaucoma. Symptoms of glaucoma are often subtle as the central vision is often preserved until the late stages. Patients frequently misattributed symptoms such as difficulty navigating obstacles to benign causes, particularly in dim environments. But now, thanks to technology developed by the research team led by Professor Christopher Leung Kai-shun, from the Department of Ophthalmology, SClinMed, glaucoma and other optic nerve diseases can be caught and treated earlier than ever. The innovative technology is called ROTA―for retinal nerve fibre layer optical texture analysis―and it is used to assess the health of the retinal nerve fibre layer (RNFL), which carries signals from the eye to the brain. ROTA assesses that layer using optical coherence tomography imaging (OCT), a noninvasive imaging technique that uses light waves to create high-resolution, crosssectional images of the retina. But while OCT has been in use for some time, on its own it has often resulted in false positives and false negatives, rendering clinical interpretations of the findings difficult, even for glaucoma specialists. ROTA overcomes this problem by using advanced computer algorithms to analyse the texture patterns with RNFL in the OCT images and reveal subtle changes indicative of eye disease, including alterations to individual axonal fibre bundles―the microscopic A New Sight Reader: Preventing Blindness Before It Starts 14
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