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 28,000 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 4,700 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 29YO 4-month pregnant female presented with acute vision loss. The internal limiting membrane (ILM) was detached throughout the entire macula (arrows), and an inferior layered sub-ILM hemorrhage spared the macular center. Her hemoglobin was later found to be 11. Acute sub-ILM hemorrhage is most common following a Valsalva maneuver or trauma (which our patient denied), but can also happen spontaneously with anemia. These hemorrhages virtually always resolve without sequelae, although the blood can be drained into the inferior vitreous by creating a small opening in the ILM using either a thermal or Nd:YAG laser. Unfortunately we have no further clinical information on our patient. [This case can be found on www.retinarocks.org in the Anemia folder, Anemia DRO-20110203]
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
