When glaucoma is diagnosed early, patients have a significantly better visual prognosis.

A recent study proposed tracking hippus (steady-state pupil oscillations) to detect glaucoma and found that this inexpensive method has potential for wide-scale, computerized detection of glaucoma.

The researchers recorded pupillary data using a commercial eye tracker device. They tracked pupil data from 40 glaucoma patients and 30 age-matched controls. Signals were de-noised. They obtained entropy of the steady-state oscillations for two light intensities: 34cd/m2² and 100cd/m².

 “At 100 cd/m², there was significant difference between the sample entropy of the healthy eyes (0.55) and glaucoma eyes (0.7),” the researchers wrote. “The results at 34 cd/m² were also significantly different, though to a lesser extent.”

The study concluded that entropy of the pupillary oscillations (hippus) obtained with an eye-tracking device demonstrated a significant difference between glaucoma and healthy eyes. They suggest this method be used for “wide-scale deployment” to glaucoma screenings.

Bhowmick S, Arjunan SP, Sarossy M, et al. Pupillometric recordings to detect glaucoma eyes. Physiol Meas. March 19, 2021. [Epub ahead of print].