Retina Rocks is a free, open-source online image library whose mission is 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 27,000 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 4,500 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.
Choroidal colobomas are caused by failure of the optic vesicle and choroidal fissure to close during fetal development. Choroidal coloboma can present as solitary or multiple lesions as in this case. Visual prognosis depends on the location and involvement of the optic nerve and macula. These patients are at risk for retinal detachment and choroidal neovascularization. Choroidal neovascularization has an increased tendency to develop at the superotemporal edge of the coloboma, which is thought to be caused by abnormal architecture of the RPE and Bruch’s membrane. Our patient is being followed yearly. [This case can be found on www.retinarocks.org in the Coloboma Non-optic nerve folder, Coloboma GSL-20181009]
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
