Exploring retinal changes in Dementia and Multiple Sclerosis

Abstract

Diagnosis and monitoring progression of neurodegenerative diseases relies on the assessment of clinical symptoms such as cognitive impairment in Alzheimer`s disease (AD) and disability in Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Detection of molecular and morphological hallmarks in the brain or spinal cord is invasive, insensitive and expensive. It has been hypothesized that changes in the retina may mirror changes in the brain. In contrast to brain imaging, imaging the eye is quick, non-invasive, inexpensive and might offering a unique “window to the brain” To test this hypothesis eye imaging studies were set up of cohorts with different type of neurodegenerative conditions such as typical and atypical Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or Multiple Sclerosis (MS). In this thesis I report on results using optical coherence tomography (OCT) as “gold standard” in neuro ophthalmology, alongside with new eye imaging and testing modalities such as ultra-widefield laser scanning ophthalmoscopy imaging (UWFI), adaptive optics (AO) and widefield perimetry combined with recently developed image analysis methods and algorithms.


In this thesis I present evidences that there are detectable changes on different eye imaging modalities that correlate with disease type and stage and outline how future studies will benefit from these results, studies that are already under way.

Date of Award	Jul 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	Optos plc
Supervisor	Imre Lengyel (Supervisor) & Tunde Peto (Supervisor)