About
These files contain data gathered in the Swanson Lab as part of grants from the National Eye Institute (NEI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). These grants focused on glaucoma, a chronic progressive optic neuropathy which is one of the leading causes of incurable blindness. The development of two clinical technologies in the middle of the 19th century made it possible to diagnose glaucoma. One technology, retinal imaging, was a development in optics that made it possible for a doctor to examine the retina, and later for photographs to be taken of the retina, and in recent decades for three-dimensional retinal scans to be taken. The other technology, perimetry, was a development in assessment of visual perception which made it possible to identify regions of the visual field where sensitivity was abnormally low. What was remarkable in patients with the disease called glaucoma was that the pattern of neural damage detected with retinal imaging corresponded to the pattern of visual loss detected with perimetry.
For a century these technologies relied on expertise, with an experienced eye doctor examining the retina and a trained technician conducting perimetry. Perimetry was very time-consuming and was reserved for those patients in which retinal evaluation indicated a likelihood of glaucoma. In the latter of the 20th century, computers made it possible to build devices to scan the retina and devices to automate perimetry, decreasing the training needed to perform these tests as well as for making initial evaluations of the patterns of damage. At first it seemed that these improvements demonstrated that the two technologies often did not agree on the pattern of damage, but over time it became clear that this was due to limitations of both technologies.
The purpose of the NEI grants to the Swanson lab was to better understand these limitations and to develop ways to overcome them. An important step was to study variability in healthy adults tested with these measures, which was found to be a key cause of poor agreement between retinal scans and perimetric findings. Another important step was to utilize advancements in retinal scanning in order to scan much larger retinal areas, making detailed spatial comparisons of the defects mapped with the two methods. This showed that defects were not always sampled well by clinical perimetry, and that good agreement was found when customized perimetry tested retinal regions where retinal imaging indicated there was neural loss. When these grants ended, Dr. Swanson retired and left future research to younger scientists. The data archived here contain the results of custom retinal imaging as well as the results of clinical perimetric and clinical imaging tests. The hope is that analysis of these may help younger scientists to develop new methods of analysis that can further improve agreement between results of retinal imaging and perimetry, and in time lead to improved clinical tests.