Oestradiol and progesterone levels are higher in menstruating women than men of the same age, and their receptors are present in their neurosensory retina and retinal pigment epithelium. However, the impact of this hormonal environment on retinal physiology in women remains unclear. Using self-reported menstrual cycle phases as a surrogate for fluctuating hormonal levels, we investigated associations with retinovascular indices on colour fundus photograph and retinal thickness in optical coherence tomography across regularly menstruating women in the UK Biobank.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSynthetic data, generated through artificial intelligence technologies such as generative adversarial networks and latent diffusion models, maintain aggregate patterns and relationships present in the real data the technologies were trained on without exposing individual identities, thereby mitigating re-identification risks. This approach has been gaining traction in biomedical research because of its ability to preserve privacy and enable dataset sharing between organisations. Although the use of synthetic data has become widespread in other domains, such as finance and high-energy physics, use in medical research raises novel issues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInvest Ophthalmol Vis Sci
October 2024
Purpose: Existing retinal vessel tortuosity metrics lack standardization and retest reliability, hindering their clinical utility. Our study addresses this gap by introducing a novel metric, coined as the "vascular curvature index" (VCI), to enhance accuracy and consistency in biomarkers associated with medical conditions. We assess VCI's performance in terms of retest reliability in healthy subjects to transform early detection and monitoring approaches for various diseases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPatient portals allowing access to electronic health care records and services can inform and empower but may widen existing sociodemographic inequities. We aimed to describe associations between activation of a paediatric patient portal and patient race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status and markers of previous engagement with health care. A retrospective single site cross-sectional study was undertaken to examine patient portal adoption amongst families of children receiving care for chronic or complex disorders within the United Kingdom.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlzheimer's disease (AD) is the leading cause of dementia worldwide. Current diagnostic modalities of AD generally focus on detecting the presence of amyloid β and tau protein in the brain (for example, positron emission tomography [PET] and cerebrospinal fluid testing), but these are limited by their high cost, invasiveness, and lack of expertise. Retinal imaging exhibits potential in AD screening and risk stratification, as the retina provides a platform for the optical visualization of the central nervous system in vivo, with vascular and neuronal changes that mirror brain pathology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have positioned it to transform several stages of the clinical trial process. In this study, we explore the role of AI in clinical trial recruitment of individuals with geographic atrophy (GA), an advanced stage of age-related macular degeneration, amidst numerous ongoing clinical trials for this condition.
Design: Cross-sectional study.
We examined the relationship between genetic risk for schizophrenia (SZ), using polygenic risk scores (PRSs), and retinal morphological alterations. Retinal structural and vascular indices derived from optical coherence tomography (OCT) and color fundus photography (CFP) and PRSs for SZ were analyzed in N = 35,024 individuals from the prospective cohort study, United Kingdom Biobank (UKB). Results indicated that macular ganglion cell-inner plexiform layer (mGC-IPL) thickness was significantly inversely related to PRS for SZ, and this relationship was strongest within higher PRS quintiles and independent of potential confounders and age.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Excessive dietary sodium intake has known adverse effects on intravascular fluid volume and systemic blood pressure, which may influence intraocular pressure (IOP) and glaucoma risk. This study aimed to assess the association of urinary sodium excretion, a biomarker of dietary intake, with glaucoma and related traits, and determine whether this relationship is modified by genetic susceptibility to disease.
Design: Cross-sectional observational and gene-environment interaction analyses in the population-based UK Biobank study.
Background: Amblyopia is a common neurodevelopmental condition and leading cause of childhood visual impairment. Given the known association between neurodevelopmental impairment and cardiometabolic dysfunction in later life, we investigated whether children with amblyopia have increased risk of cardiometabolic disorders in adult life.
Methods: This was a cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of 126,399 United Kingdom Biobank cohort participants who underwent ocular examination.
Chronic, non-communicable diseases present a major barrier to living a long and healthy life. In many cases, early diagnosis can facilitate prevention, monitoring, and treatment efforts, improving patient outcomes. There is therefore a critical need to make screening techniques as accessible, unintimidating, and cost-effective as possible.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Periodontitis, a ubiquitous severe gum disease affecting the teeth and surrounding alveolar bone, can heighten systemic inflammation. We investigated the association between very severe periodontitis and early biomarkers of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), in individuals with no eye disease.
Design: Cross-sectional analysis of the prospective community-based cohort United Kingdom (UK) Biobank.
Prcis: In this cross-sectional analysis of UK Biobank participants, we find no adverse association between self-reported oral health conditions and either glaucoma or elevated intraocular pressures.
Purpose: Poor oral health may cause inflammation, which accelerates the progression of neurodegenerative diseases. We investigated the relationship between oral health and glaucoma.
Purpose: We aim to use fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) to label the capillaries on color fundus (CF) photographs and train a deep learning model to quantify retinal capillaries noninvasively from CF and apply it to cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk assessment.
Design: Cross-sectional and longitudinal study.
Participants: A total of 90732 pairs of CF-FFA images from 3893 participants for segmentation model development, and 49229 participants in the UK Biobank for association analysis.
Characterising clinically-relevant vascular features, such as vessel density and fractal dimension, can benefit biomarker discovery and disease diagnosis for both ophthalmic and systemic diseases. In this work, we explicitly encode vascular features into an end-to-end loss function for multi-class vessel segmentation, categorising pixels into artery, vein, uncertain pixels, and background. This clinically-relevant feature optimised loss function (CF-Loss) regulates networks to segment accurate multi-class vessel maps that produce precise vascular features.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Smoking may influence measured IOP through an effect on corneal biomechanics, but it is unclear whether this factor translates into an increased risk for glaucoma. This study aimed to examine the association of cigarette smoking with corneal biomechanical properties and glaucoma-related traits, and to probe potential causal effects using Mendelian randomization (MR).
Methods: Cross-sectional analyses within the UK Biobank (UKB) and Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA) cohorts.
Purpose: To investigate the sociodemographic profile, the association with retinal vascular diseases (RVD) and systemic comorbidities, and visual outcomes of patients with paracentral acute middle maculopathy (PAMM) in a large, ethnically diverse single-center cohort.
Design: Retrospective cohort study.
Methods: Electronic health record query for all patients presenting with PAMM at Moorfields Eye Hospital, London, was completed.
Medical artificial intelligence (AI) offers great potential for recognizing signs of health conditions in retinal images and expediting the diagnosis of eye diseases and systemic disorders. However, the development of AI models requires substantial annotation and models are usually task-specific with limited generalizability to different clinical applications. Here, we present RETFound, a foundation model for retinal images that learns generalizable representations from unlabelled retinal images and provides a basis for label-efficient model adaptation in several applications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Objectives: Cadaveric studies have shown disease-related neurodegeneration and other morphological abnormalities in the retina of individuals with Parkinson disease (PD); however, it remains unclear whether this can be reliably detected with in vivo imaging. We investigated inner retinal anatomy, measured using optical coherence tomography (OCT), in prevalent PD and subsequently assessed the association of these markers with the development of PD using a prospective research cohort.
Methods: This cross-sectional analysis used data from 2 studies.
Background/aims: Evaluation of telemedicine care models has highlighted its potential for exacerbating healthcare inequalities. This study seeks to identify and characterise factors associated with non-attendance across face-to-face and telemedicine outpatient appointments.
Methods: A retrospective cohort study at a tertiary-level ophthalmic institution in the UK, between 1 January 2019 and 31 October 2021.