Department of Computer Science at UH

University of Houston

Department of Computer Science

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Nripun Sredar

Will defend his dissertation


Examining In Vivo Changes in the Lamina Cribrosa in Non-human Primates with Experimental Glaucoma

Abstract

Glaucoma is the leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide. It is a multifactorial disease that affects the optic nerve head that results in the degeneration of retinal ganglion cell axons and the death of retinal ganglion cells. Ex vivo and post mortem studies support the idea that the initial damage to these axons occurs at the lamina cribrosa located within the optic nerve head (ONH).The main goal of this work is to characterize early changes in the lamina cribrosa microarchitecture using in vivo and non-invasive methods to better understand the mechanisms behind the disease.

In this work, we have focused on using in vivo imaging modalities like spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SDOCT) and adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscope (AOSLO) to image the lamina cribrosa at different time points. We then characterize the 3D lamina cribrosa geometry for normal and glaucoma eyes.We assess the repeatability of our methods of measuring the connective tissue microarchitecture in normal eyes imaged at different time points. The method pipeline consists of image acquisition, image preprocessing to improve image quality, 3D modeling of the anterior lamina surface, automatic lamina orientation estimation, automated lamina cribrosa pore boundary identification and statistical tests to estimate change over time. We validated the performance of our methods using synthetic data and compared its performace with other popular methods. We compared our findings with the results reported in ex vivo studies.

 

Date: Thursday, April 14, 2015
Time: 1:00 PM
Place: HBS 315

Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.
Advisor: Prof. George Zouridakis