Retinal Biomarkers Discovery for Cerebral Small Vessel Disease in an Older Population

The retinal and cerebral microvasculatures share many morphological and physiological properties. In this pilot we study the strength of the associations between morphological measurements of the retinal vasculature, obtained from fundus camera images, and of features of Small Vessel Disease (SVD), as white matter hyperintensities (WMH) and perivascular spaces (PVS), obtained from MRI brain scans. We performed a 500-trial bootstrap analysis with Regularized Gaussian linear regression on a cohort of older community-dwelling subjects (Lothian Birth Cohort 1936, N = 866) in their eighth decade. Arteriolar bifurcation coefficients, vessel tortuosity and fractal dimension predicted WMH volume in 23% of the trials. Arteriolar widths, venular bifurcation coefficients, and venular tortuosity predicted PVS in up to 99.6% of the trials.