Taking the “Guesswork” Out of Glaucoma Clinical Management with Novel Imaging

Summary Glaucoma is a leading cause of irreversible vision loss in Australian and worldwide. This project seeks to examine whether state-of-the-art imaging can be used to transform the clinical management of glaucoma.

Project Details

The clinical management of glaucoma seeks to prevent patients from experiencing visual disability from the progressive degeneration of retinal ganglion cells. This task is especially difficult by the lack of effective methods to detect and characterise disease progression accurately and meaningfully. Current clinical tests are currently so variable that clinicians are often left with a great deal of “guesswork” in the clinical management of glaucoma. Optical coherence tomography is a modern clinical imaging technique that could accurately detect disease progression and predict long-term outcomes, given its ability to non-invasively visualise the retina three-dimensionally at near-cellular resolution.

This powerful technology could be exploited to transform the clinical management of glaucoma patients. This project will involve development of this imaging technique and analytical methods and understanding its relation to patient-reported measures of visual disability to understand the clinical relevance of its results.