Perception and Practice of Undergoing Glaucoma Screening among Ophthalmologists

Background: Globally, glaucoma remains the leading cause of irreversible blindness. Early detection and treatment is mainstay of prevention of blindness from glaucoma. Purpose: This study was done to assess the perception and glaucoma screening practice of ophthalmologist in Nigeria. Methods: This is a cross-sectional descriptive study. A pretested structured questionnaire was administered to all the ophthalmologists who attended the general plenary session of the 2013 annual conference of the Ophthalmological Society of Nigeria (OSN). Result: Of the 115 respondents, 63 (54.8%) were females;mean age was 39.7 ± 9.3 years. Majority 69 (60.0%) were less than 40 years old. Presence of systemic risk factors to glaucoma was reported by 19 (16.5%), out of which 9 (47.4%) were hypertension, 2 (10.5%) were Diabetes Mellitus, 2 (10.5%) were other cardiovascular diseases, and 6 were unspecified others. Among the respondents, 28 (24.3%) had positive family history;29 (25.2%) had Myopia;and 3 (2.6%) were known glaucoma patients already on treatment. Majority 91 (79.1%) had positive attitude towards glaucoma screening. Although 98 (85.2%) have ever had a full eye examination, only 56 (48.7%) were routine. There was no statistically significant relationship between sex, age group, religion, positive family history, professional status, attitude and glaucoma screening. Conclusion: The attitude of Nigerian Ophthalmologists to glaucoma screening was high but actual screening practice was below expectation in view of their presumed high knowledge of the risk of blindness from glaucoma. In-house campaign aimed at promoting self-glaucoma screening among this high-cadre eye care providers is warranted.

A narrative review of glaucoma screening from fundus images

The objective of the paper is to provide a general view for automatic cup to disc ratio(CDR)assessment in fundus images.As for the cause of blindness,glaucoma ranks as the second in ocular diseases.Vision loss caused by glaucoma cannot be reversed,but the loss may be avoided if screened in the early stage of glaucoma.Thus,early screening of glaucoma is very requisite to preserve vision and maintain quality of life.Optic nerve head(ONH)assessment is a useful and practical technique among current glaucoma screening methods.Vertical CDR as one of the clinical indicators for ONH assessment,has been well-used by clinicians and professionals for the analysis and diagnosis of glaucoma.The key for automatic calculation of vertical CDR in fundus images is the segmentation of optic cup(OC)and optic disc(OD).We take a brief description of methodologies about the OC and disc optic segmentation and comprehensively presented these methods as two aspects:hand-craft feature and deep learning feature.Sliding window regression,super-pixel level,image reconstruction,super-pixel level low-rank representation(LRR),deep learning methodologies for segmentation of OD and OC have been shown.It is hoped that this paper can provide guidance and bring inspiration to other researchers.Every mentioned method has its advantages and limitations.Appropriate method should be selected or explored according to the actual situation.For automatic glaucoma screening,CDR is just the reflection for a small part of the disc,while utilizing comprehensive factors or multimodal images is the promising future direction to furthermore enhance the performance.