Wide-field corneal subbasal nerve plexus mosaics in age-controlled healthy and type 2 diabetes populations

Sci Data. 2018 Apr 24:5:180075. doi: 10.1038/sdata.2018.75.

Abstract

A dense nerve plexus in the clear outer window of the eye, the cornea, can be imaged in vivo to enable non-invasive monitoring of peripheral nerve degeneration in diabetes. However, a limited field of view of corneal nerves, operator-dependent image quality, and subjective image sampling methods have led to difficulty in establishing robust diagnostic measures relating to the progression of diabetes and its complications. Here, we use machine-based algorithms to provide wide-area mosaics of the cornea's subbasal nerve plexus (SBP) also accounting for depth (axial) fluctuation of the plexus. Degradation of the SBP with age has been mitigated as a confounding factor by providing a dataset comprising healthy and type 2 diabetes subjects of the same age. To maximize reuse, the dataset includes bilateral eye data, associated clinical parameters, and machine-generated SBP nerve density values obtained through automatic segmentation and nerve tracing algorithms. The dataset can be used to examine nerve degradation patterns to develop tools to non-invasively monitor diabetes progression while avoiding narrow-field imaging and image selection biases.

Publication types

  • Dataset
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Aging
  • Algorithms
  • Cornea / innervation*
  • Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2 / pathology
  • Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2 / physiopathology*
  • Humans
  • Middle Aged
  • Nerve Tissue / pathology
  • Nerve Tissue / physiopathology

Associated data

  • figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.3950197