Fixels fix the picture of the brain in glaucoma

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In the ophthalmic disease glaucoma, the visual pathways from the eye to the brain get damaged, but why this happens is still debated. In a paper in the scientific journal “Investigative Ophthalmology and Vision Science (IOVS)”, Shereif Haykal and colleagues report that a new MRI analysis technique, called Fixel-Based Analysis (FBA), provides a much clearer and better interpretable “picture” of the visual pathways. By comparing these improved pictures of glaucoma patients and age-matched control participants, they conclude that a degenerative process that originates in the eye is the primary cause of the visual pathway degeneration in glaucoma. Want to know more about the new technique or these findings? Find the paper here.

Fixels in action: each colored bar indicates the presence of nerve fibers oriented in a specific direction. In the paper, Haykal and colleagues compared MRI-based fixel patterns between glaucoma patients and age-matched control participants.