A new technology ROTA developed by HKUMed and CU Medicine can visualise axonal fibre bundles on the retina to advance early diagnosis of glaucoma and optic neuropathies

A research team led by the Department of Ophthalmology, School of Clinical Medicine, LKS Faculty of Medicine of The University of Hong Kong (HKUMed), with collaborators from the Faculty of Medicine of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CU Medicine) and local and international partners, have developed a new technology ROTA (Retinal nerve fibre layer Optical Texture Analysis) to unveil the optical texture and trajectories of the axonal fibre bundles on the retina. ROTA outperforms the current clinical standards, attaining 15.0% to 28.4% higher in sensitivity in detecting early optic nerve damage in glaucoma – the leading cause of irreversible blindness. The research has been published in Nature Biomedical Engineering [1].