Retina Rocks, the official image bank of the Retina World Congress, 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 31,000 multimodal images 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 5,500 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.
This 33YO female presented with this symptomatic lesion in her left macula. Vision was 20/25 in her normal right eye, and 20/300 in her left eye. A granulomatous lesion was noted in the inferior left macula (top, white arrow). A vertical OCT B-scan through this lesion (bottom) showed choroidal hyporeflective thickening (red arrow), an overlying subretinal/intraretinal hyperreflective lesion (orange arrow), and superior subretinal fluid (yellow arrow). Laboratory testing was positive for QuantiFERON-TB Gold, and negative for FTA, CBC, ACE. Unfortunately, despite numerous attempts to reach this patient, she was lost to follow up. Tuberculosis (TB) is a systemic disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, characterized by caseating granuloma formation throughout the body. Although pulmonary involvement is the most common, extrapulmonary sites can include the gastrointestinal, skin, cardiovascular, genitourinary, and central nervous systems including the eyes. Ocular involvement, similar to syphilis, can mimic virtually any type of uveitis including anterior, intermediate, posterior, and panuveitis, retinitis and retinal vasculitis, neuroretinitis, optic neuropathy, and choroidal granuloma (this patient), choroiditis and scleritis. For an excellent review of intraocular tuberculosis, see Bupta et al, Survey Ophthalmology 2007;52:561-587.
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
