In this study, we found that 3D-OCT was more sensitive and reproducible than FA for the detection of CME by trained expert human graders. These results appear to corroborate previous reports that CME can be present in the absence of leakage into cystoid spaces on FA.
5,14–18 Since this study dealt only with CME, these results should not be extrapolated to compare detection of noncystoid leakage by FA with that of noncystoid edema by 3D-OCT.
CME is a pathologic definition with two components: abnormal collection of extracellular fluid and cystoid space formation.
6 With FA, the presence of excess intraretinal fluid is often suggested by the progressive leakage of dye, sometimes with accumulation in apparently well-demarcated spaces. The presence of leakage on FA, however, is not always consistent with accumulation of intraretinal fluid. In the normal eye, the volume and composition of the extracellular compartment of the neurosensory retina is regulated by retinal capillary endothelial cell tight junctions (inner blood–retinal barrier), retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cell tight junctions (outer blood–retinal barrier), and by the pumping function of RPE cells. Thus, intraretinal fluid can accumulate when there is loss of functional integrity in either of these fluid barriers and/or loss of an effective RPE pump. Although leakage of fluid (and progressive hyperfluorescence on FA) can result in fluid accumulation, leakage may also occur without fluid accumulation if the fluid that leaks into the retina or subretinal space is pumped out by the RPE cells at the same or a greater rate than the leakage. In this situation, fluorescein leakage would be visible on FA without corresponding fluid accumulation.
The opposite scenario is also possible. For example, fluid accumulation may occur without obvious hyperfluorescence if the source of leakage is very small, and the fluorescein molecules leak slowly and disperse quickly into the space. In this situation, these tissues may hyperfluoresce very late on the FA and appear only faintly hyperfluorescent on FA images captured within the typical time scale (up to 10 minutes). For this reason, FA may fail to demonstrate CME. In addition, in complex diseases such as CME in the setting of choroidal neovascularization (CNV), the accumulation of dye in intraretinal cystoid spaces may be difficult to distinguish from leakage from the underlying CNV or RPE alterations.
OCT has been touted to provide superior morphologic information compared with color photography and angiography. Numerous articles support this perspective by describing the presence of CME on OCT in a variety of macular diseases.
5,14,16–18 However, in most of these previous studies time-domain OCT instruments such as the Stratus OCT (Carl Zeiss Meditec, Dublin, CA) were used and a standardized protocol for CME interpretation was not implemented. The limitations of the sparse scanning density of time-domain OCT coupled with unstandardized evaluation methods may reduce the power of the conclusions in these previous studies and may limit their applicability in an era increasingly dominated by spectral domain OCT.
In a study of patients with diabetes mellitus, Ozdek et al.,
3 detected CME with Stratus OCT in 30 (15.4%) eyes but could not confirm the diagnosis with FA in 63.3% of these cases. These results suggest that OCT is an important tool for detecting foveal changes that are not evident in diabetic eyes angiographically. However, this discrepancy, which is much larger than in our analysis, could also be the result of masking of the cystoid staining pattern in eyes with severe focal and diffuse leakage. Furthermore, it also could be the result of using different assessment methods for CME on OCT. If, for example, the authors used a lower threshold for determining the presence of a cystoid space on OCT versus FA, they could have discovered a larger disparity between FA and OCT for CME detection. In contrast, in the present study, a cystoid space was deemed to be present only if it was visible on two adjacent scans. Since the space between two B-scans in a 3D-OCT volume scan consisting of 128 B-scans across 6 mm is 47 μm, cystoid spaces would have to be at least 50 μm in diameter to fulfill our criteria.
We have proposed a simple and objective method of reporting of CME by using 3D-OCT. It is our hope that applying this criterion will lead to better grading reproducibility for cystoid spaces by the reading center graders. In this study, we did, in fact, observe significantly better intergrader agreement for OCT grading compared with FA grading. Specifically, the κ scores for multiple graders assessing 3D-OCT scans were higher than those obtained with FA, both before and after adjudication and regardless of inclusion or exclusion of questionable grades. Before adjudication, which better simulates a real clinical setting where only one clinician assesses diagnostic studies, intergrader agreement for 3D-OCT including questionable grades showed substantial agreement among different graders (Fleiss' κ = 0.61), whereas the agreement for FA was only moderate (Fleiss' κ = 0.43).
Regardless of how questionable grades were treated, 3D-OCT was found in this study to be more sensitive than FA for identifying intraretinal cystoid spaces (ranging from 83% to 99% for 3D-OCT and 44% to 74% for FA). This superior sensitivity of 3D-OCT was consistently observed regardless of underlying disease etiology. These results were somewhat unexpected, as we suspected that the disparity in sensitivity would be greater in eyes with choroidal vascular disease where underlying fluorescence could potentially make detection of cystoid spaces on FA more difficult. It should be noted that interpretation of the sensitivity results according to disease etiology are somewhat confounded in our analysis by the fact that several patients had more than one underlying disease (e.g., patients with both diabetic retinopathy and an ERM) and the disease subgroups were relatively small (n = 20–161; mean, 90.6).
In this study, we found no relationship between the inclusion of additional FA frames from the transited eye and improved detection of CME by FA when compared with 3D-OCT. As noted in the Methods section, the Doheny Imaging Unit FA protocol requires photographers to obtain mid- and late-phase images of both eyes. Since the cystoid spaces are most clearly evident in the late phases after there has been time for dye to pool in the space, this observation is not surprising.
This study has several limitations. The data were collected retrospectively, and thus there is a potential ascertainment bias. In addition, although the photographers at the Doheny Ophthalmic Imaging Unit use standard protocols for FA and 3D-OCT imaging, there may be variability due to physician and patient factors. These variables include different fields of view (50° vs. 35°), different late frame times (10 vs. 15 minutes), inconsistent venous access, and different amounts of stereopsis in stereo image pairs. Since only one eye was transited, the amount of FA image data differed for approximately half of the eyes in this study, although, as mentioned, no relationship was observed between sensitivity results and the transited eye. Differential effects of media opacities on FA and 3D-OCT image quality may have played a role in the graders' ability to recognize accumulation of dye in cystoid spaces on FA. In addition, the threshold used to identify cystoid spaces on 3D-OCT may have been too high, since it excludes potential cystoid spaces less than 50 μm in diameter. However, if this were the case, we would have measured an even greater sensitivity for 3D-OCT which would not have substantially changed the study's conclusions.
Lack of a definite ground truth is also a limitation. Ideally, FA and OCT findings should be compared to histology. Since this is obviously not possible, we chose to use the combined findings of both modalities as the best available surrogate. This combined gold standard approach removes the possibility of having false positives and therefore results in perfect specificity. In turn, this method could enable unrealistic estimations of sensitivity if, for instance, the threshold for detection of CME by OCT were too low.
The handling of questionable grades is another potential limitation. Because the optimal method for handling these indeterminate grades is uncertain, we evaluated multiple strategies for excluding or including these cases. As a result, we are only able to provide a range of sensitivities. We were reassured to see a consistent relationship regardless of the method chosen.