Retina Rocks was founded as a free, open-source resource to help educate the world’s eye care providers about why the retina rocks!
The collection, culled from our fellowships and from patients we’ve personally seen in our practice, was created over a 30-year period as an internal teaching collection at Bennett & Bloom Eye Centers in Louisville, KY. In 2019 the collection was donated to seed Retina Rocks with its initial files, which currently contains over 26,000 multimodal images and videos covering the spectrum of vitreoretinal disorders. We publish cool cases every Monday through Friday on our Instagram feed, @retina.rocks. These cases can also be directly viewed here from within this site. Retina Rocks also includes bite-sized annotated bibliographies for most disorders covering over 4,300 major publications and studies. Here’s a sampling of what these look like.
We love gorgeous pictures so virtually all images are of publication quality. More important than a pretty picture, however, is what that picture teaches us about a disease. Many of the Retina Rocks images are therefore meant to tell a story or convey a “teaching moment,” exploring the multiple ways a disease changes over time, responds to treatment or presents with a cool or unique finding.
This patient with previously stable involuted proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) presented with some symptomatic superior field loss. A yellow and red subhyaloid hemorrhage was noted in the inferior macula. The more dependent red blood is hypoautofluorescent and the devitalized, more superior yellow blood is intensely hyperautofluorescent. Devitalized blood includes breakdown products of hemoglobin, including free bases (the heme porphyrin molecule without its iron ion). The free bases absorb blue light and thus appear yellow. The causative neovascularization is likely beneath the blood since angiography shows no leakage. On OCT, the yellow blood is hyperreflective throughout, and the red blood is hyperreflective on its surface and shadows more posteriorly. [This case can be found on www.retinarocks.org in the DR (Diabetic retinopathy) 08 PDR folder, DR PDR ILW-20200729]
Here are this month's articles (prior months' articles in Retina Rocks are located in the _Key retina journal articles folder at the top of the collection). Every month we pull key clinical references from the major ophthalmic and retinal journals. Although we can't provide the actual journal article PDF for obvious copyright issues, we provide a single line citation including a brief summary of the article's main points. Our goal is not to be inclusive, but to capture all major clinically relevant references.
Click here for all archived cases
