Glaucomatous Injury of Central Nerve System: The Role of Neuroimaging Technology in the Understanding of Disease

Understanding glaucoma is an endless process of continuous integration; for example glaucoma, which was firstly recognized to be a disease limited to the eye, has now been considered as a disease affecting the whole visual pathway with the characteristics of optic nerve injury in addition to corresponding visual field defects. Relevant contents have been elaborated in Chap. 6. In the process of overall integration, medical imaging technology plays an important role. There are varied approaches to study the characteristics and mechanisms of human diseases, especially with the booming progress of life science and modern molecular biology, so that the research can be carried out at the cellular level and molecular level. However, molecular biology has its insurmountable weakness—the limitation of the research object, as researchers can only inspect with clues from all kinds of animal models, autopsy of dead patients, and a small amount of local tissue from patients, and then infer to the human body. Only by morphological and functional observation in vivo could we understand the disease most authentically and effectively, which was barely possible for molecular biological method to achieve, while fortunately the imaging technology provides a means to realize the above purpose. This section discusses the role of neuroimaging techniques in understanding the process of damage to CNS by glaucoma, and it is hopefully that through reading this chapter, the readers would be able to understand advanced neuroimaging techniques used in ophthalmology nowadays; thus they would integrate the research methods of both molecular biology and imaging, the local part as the eye and the whole entire body, to provide new ideas and methods for further understanding glaucoma and other ophthalmic and nervous system diseases.