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 30,000 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 5,200 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 40YO female presented with 20/400 in her right eye and counting finger in her left eye due to classic findings from Stargardt’s disease, including perifoveal yellow subretinal flecks, variable outer retinal and RPE atrophy, and fundus autofluorescence changes. The bull’s-eye pattern of outer retinal and RPE atrophy is best seen on the OCT of her left eye (image 3, bottom). The outer plexiform layer (OPL, red arrow) marks the innermost portion of the intact photoreceptors more peripherally. The loss of the photoreceptors is seen as the OPL descends towards the RPE, eventually resulting in fairly complete outer retinal and RPE atrophy (yellow arrow). Stargardt’s disease is an autosomal recessive disorder caused by a mutation in the ABCA4 gene. The ABCA4 protein is located in the photoreceptor outer segments and is involved in the recycling of 11-cis-retinal. The mutation of this gene causes accumulation of lipofuscin in the RPE, which eventually leads to photoreceptor and RPE degeneration. Other ABCA4 disorders include fundus flavimaculatus and cone-rod dystrophy. [This case can be found on www.retinarocks.org in the Stargardt's disease folder, Stargardt's disease HRN-20190104].
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
