24 Jul 20. Featured Paper

Retinal biomarkers discovery for cerebral small vessel disease in an older population.

Link to paper on Springer Nature

Authors

Lucia Ballerini, Ahmed E. Fetit, Stephan Wunderlich, Ruggiero Lovreglio, Sarah McGrory, Maria Valdes-Hernandez, Tom MacGillivray, Fergus Doubal, Ian J. Deary, Joanna Wardlaw, Emanuele Trucco

Abstract

The retinal & cerebral microvasculatures share many morphological & physiological properties.

In this pilot we study the strength of the associations between morphological measurements of the retinal vasculature, obtained from fundus camera images, & of features of Small Vessel Disease (SVD), as white matter hyperintensities (WMH) & perivascular spaces (PVS), obtained from MRI brain scans.

We performed a 500-trial bootstrap analysis with Regularized Gaussian linear regression on a cohort of older community-dwelling subjects (Lothian Birth Cohort 1936, N = 866) in their eighth decade.

Arteriolar bifurcation coefficients, vessel tortuosity & fractal dimension predicted WMH volume in 23% of the trials.

Arteriolar widths, venular bifurcation coefficients, & venular tortuosity predicted PVS in up to 99.6% of the trials.

Keywords

• Biomarkers 
• Retina 
• Small vessel disease