Facultad de Ciencias de la Salud

Oxidative stress forms part of the molecular basis contributing to the development and manifestation of myopia, a refractive error with associated pathology that is increasingly prevalent worldwide and that subsequently leads to an upsurge in degenerative visual impairment due to conditions that are especially associated with high myopia. The purpose of our study was to examine the interrelation of potential oxidative-stress-related metabolites found in the aqueous humor of high-myopic, low-myopic, and non-myopic patients within a clinical study. We conducted a cross-sectional study, selecting two sets of patients undergoing cataract surgery. The first set, which was used to analyze metabolites through an NMR assay, comprised 116 patients. A total of 59 metabolites were assigned and quantified. The PLS-DA score plot clearly showed a separation with minimal overlap between the HM and control samples. The PLS-DA model allowed us to determine 31 major metabolite differences in the aqueous humor of the study groups. Complementary statistical analysis of the data allowed us to determine six metabolites that presented significant differences among the experimental groups (p < 005). A significant number of these metabolites were discovered to have a direct or indirect connection to oxidative stress linked with conditions of myopic eyes. Notably, we identified metabolites associated with bioenergetic pathways and metabolites that have undergone methylation, along with choline and its derivatives. The second set consisted of 73 patients who underwent a glutathione assay. Here, we showed significant variations in both reduced and oxidized glutathione in aqueous humor among all patient groups (p < 0.01) for the first time. Axial length, refractive status, and complete ophthalmologic examination were also recorded, and interrelations among metabolic and clinical parameters were evaluated.

High myopia (HM) is both a medical problem and refractive error of the eye owing to excessive eyeball length, which progressively makes eye tissue atrophic, and is one of the main causes for diminishing visual acuity in developed countries. Despite its high prevalence and many genetic and proteomic studies, no molecular pattern exists that explain the degenerative process underlying HM, which predisposes patients to other diseases like glaucoma, cataracts, retinal detachment and chorioretinal atrophy that affect the macular area. To determine the relation between complement Factors H (CFH) and D (CFD) and the maculopathy of patients with degenerative myopia, we studied aqueous humor samples that were collected by aspiration from 122 patients during cataract surgery. Eyes were classified according to eyeball axial length as high myopia (axial length > 26 mm), low myopia (axial length 23.5–25.9 mm) and control (axial length < 23.4 mm). The degree of maculopathy was classified according to fundus oculi findings following IMI’s classification. Subfoveal choroid thickness was measured by optical coherence tomography. CFH and CFD measurements were taken by ELISA. CFH levels were significantly high in the high myopia group vs. the low myopia and control groups (p < 0.05). Significantly high CFH values were found in those eyes with choroid atrophy and neovascularization (p < 0.05). In parallel, the CFH concentration correlated inversely with choroid thickness (R = 􀀀0.624). CFD levels did not correlate with maculopathy. All the obtained data seem to suggest that CFH plays a key role in myopic pathology.

The aim of this study was to identify a relation between the clinical characteristics and differences in lipid peroxidation in the subretinal fluid (SRF) of rhegmatogenous retinal detached patients by malondialdehyde (MDA) quantification. We collected 65 SRF samples from consecutive patients during scleral buckling surgery in rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (RRD) eyes. In addition to a complete ophthalmic evaluation, we studied the refractive status, evolution time, and the number of detached retinal quadrants to establish the extension of RRD.We studied the clinical aspects and oxidative stress and compared the characteristics among groups. We found that neither the evolution time of RRD nor the patients’ age correlated with the MDA concentration in the SRF. The MDA and the protein content of the SRF increased in the patients with high myopia and with more extended RRD. Our results suggest that oxidative imbalance was important in more extended retinal detachment (RD) and in myopic eyes and should be taken into account in the managing of these cases.

Background: to compare the extent of the detached retina and retinal tears location in rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (RRD) among non-mydriatic ultra-wide field (UWF) imaging, dilated fundus exam (DFE), and intraoperative evaluation. Methods: this retrospective chart review comprised 123 patients undergoing surgery for RRD. A masked retina specialist analyzed the UWF fundus images for RRD area, status of the macula, and presence and location of retinal breaks. The same variables were collected from a database including DFE and intraoperative recordings. Evaluation methods were compared. Results: mean age was 59.8 14.9 years. Best-corrected visual acuity improved from 0.25 0.3 (Snellen) to 0.67 0.3 at 12 months (p = 0.009). The RRD description and assessment of macula status (34.5% macula-on) did not di er between UWF, DFE, and intraoperative examination. The inferior quadrant was involved most frequently (41.5%), followed by the superior (38.9%), temporal (27.8%) and nasal quadrant (14.8%). Intraoperative exam detected 96.7% of retinal tears compared with DFE (73.2%, p = 0.008) and UWF imaging (65%, p=0.003). UWF imaging and DFE did not di er significantly. Conclusion: RRD extent on DFE and UWF images was consistent with intraoperative findings. UWF and DFE detection of peripheral retinal tears was similar, but 25% of retinal breaks were missed until intraoperative evaluation.

Myopia is one of the commonest eye pathologies that could affect 2.56 billion people by 2020. Today high myopia is a leading cause of blindness worldwide due to associated ocular illness. Nevertheless, the cellular bases for these diseases to develop are unclear in many areas. We conducted a prospective study of oxidative stress and growth factors in human myopic and non myopic eyes in an attempt to increase our understanding of the underlying physiopathological conditions to adequately early diagnose, prevent and treat the retina problem that derives from myopia. Aqueous humor samples were obtained from 41 patients being operated for cataracts in our hospital. Axial length, refractive status and complete ophthalmologic examination were recorded. The VEGF and HGF levels were determined by an ELISA kit. Total antioxidant capacity and total nitrites/nitrate levels were established with a lab kit. We show for the first time an increase in the total nitrite levels in high myopia. We also propose for the first time the concurrence of three factors: myopia, oxidative stress, and oxidative stress together with growth factors in the same group of patients. In this way, it would not be accurate to envision high myopia as a type of normal myopia, but one with more diopters or longer axial length.

Glaucoma is a chronic eye disease and one of the major causes of permanent blindness. Since it does not show initial symptoms, early diagnosis is important to limit its progression. This paper presents an automatic optic nerve characterization algorithm for glaucoma diagnosis based only on retinal fundus images. For optic cup segmentation, we used a new method based on the stochastic watershed transformation applied on the YIQ colour space to extract clinical indicators such as the Cup/Disc ratio, the area Cup/Disc ratio and the ISNT rule. Afterwards, an assessment between normal and glaucomatous fundus images is performed. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on 6 di erent (private and public) databases containing 723 images (377 normal and 346 glaucomatous images) which achieved a specificity and sensitivity of 0.674 and 0.675, respectively. Moreover, an F-score of 0:770 was obtained when evaluating this method on the publicly available database Drishti-GS1. A comparison of the proposed work with other state-of-the-art methods demonstrates the robustness of the proposed algorithm; because it was tested using images from di erent databases with high variability, which is a common issue in this area. Additional comparisons with existing works for cup segmentation, that use the publicly available database Drishti-GS1, are also presented in this paper.

Background: Most current algorithms for automatic glaucoma assessment using fundus images rely on handcrafted features based on segmentation, which are affected by the performance of the chosen segmentation method and the extracted features. Among other characteristics, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are known because of their ability to learn highly discriminative features from raw pixel intensities. Methods: In this paper, we employed five different ImageNet-trained models (VGG16, VGG19, InceptionV3, ResNet50 and Xception) for automatic glaucoma assessment using fundus images. Results from an extensive validation using cross-validation and cross-testing strategies were compared with previous works in the literature. Results: Using five public databases (1707 images), an average AUC of 0.9605 with a 95% confidence interval of 95.92–97.07%, an average specificity of 0.8580 and an average sensitivity of 0.9346 were obtained after using the Xception architecture, significantly improving the performance of other state-of-the-art works. Moreover, a new clinical database, ACRIMA, has been made publicly available, containing 705 labelled images. It is composed of 396 glaucomatous images and 309 normal images, which means, the largest public database for glaucoma diagnosis. The high specificity and sensitivity obtained from the proposed approach are supported by an extensive validation using not only the cross-validation strategy but also the cross-testing validation on, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, all publicly available glaucoma-labelled databases. Conclusions: These results suggest that using ImageNet-trained models is a robust alternative for automatic glaucoma screening system. All images, CNN weights and software used to fine-tune and test the five CNNs are publicly available, which could be used as a testbed for further comparisons.

Aqueous humor is the transparent fluid found in the anterior chamber of the eye that provides the metabolic requirements to the avascular tissues surrounding it. Despite the fact that metabolomics could be a powerful tool in the characterization of this biofluid and in revealing metabolic signatures of common ocular diseases such as myopia, it has never to our knowledge previously been applied in humans. In this research a novel method for the analysis of aqueous humor is presented to show its application in the characterization of this biofluid using CE–MS. The method was extended to a dual platform method (CE–MS and LC–MS) in order to compare samples from patients with different severities of myopia in order to explore the disease from the metabolic phenotype point of view. With this method, a profound knowledge of the metabolites present in human aqueous humor has been obtained: over 40 metabolites were reproducibly and simultaneously identified from a low volume of sample by CE–MS, including among others, a vast number of amino acids and derivatives. When this method was extended to study groups of patients with high or low myopia in both CE–MS and LC–MS, it has been possible to identify over 20 significantly different metabolite and lipid signatures that distinguish patients based on the severity of myopia. Among these, the most notable higher abundant metabolites in high myopia were aminooctanoic acid, arginine, citrulline and sphinganine while features of low myopia were aminoundecanoic acid, dihydro-retinoic acid and cysteinylglycine disulfide. This dual platform approach offered complementarity such that different metabolites were detected in each technique. Together the experiments presented provide a whelm of valuable information about human aqueous humor and myopia, proving the utility of non-targeted metabolomics for the first time in analyzing this type of sample and the metabolic phenotype of this disease.

Introduction: Uveitis is an eye disease characterized by inflammation of the uvea and an early and exhaustive diagnosis is essential for its treatment. The aim of our study is to assess the potential toxicity and anti-inflammatory efficacy of Bevacizumab in an experimental uveitis model by subcutaneously injecting lipopolysaccharide into Lewis rats and to clarify its mechanism. Material and Methods: Blood–aqueous barrier integrity was assessed 24 h after endotoxin-induced uveitis (EIU) by analyzing two parameters: cell count and protein concentration in aqueous humors. Histopathology of all eye structures was also studied. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent analyses of the aqueous humor samples were performed in order to calculate the diverse chemokine and cytokine protein levels and oxidative stress-related markers were also evaluated. Results: The aqueous humor’s cellular content significantly increased in the group treated with only Bevacizumab, but it had no effect on retina histopathological grading. Nevertheless, the inflammation noted in ocular structures when administering Bevacizumab with endotoxin was mostly prevented since aqueous humor cell content considerably lowered, and concomitantly with a sharp drop in uveal, vitreous, and retina histopathological grading. The values of the multi-faceted cytokine IL-2 also significantly decreased (p < 0.05 vs. endotoxin group), and the protective IL-6 and IL-10 cytokines values rose with related anti-oxidant system recovery (p < 0.05 vs. endotoxin group). Concurrently, some related M1 macrophage chemokines substantially increased, e.g., GRO/KC, a chemokine that also displays any kind of protective role. Conclusion: All these results revealed that 24 h after being administered, Bevacizumab treatment in EIU significantly prevented inflammation in various eye structures and correct results in efficacy vs. toxicity balance were obtained.