Purpose
To study the feasibility of simultaneous peripheral and central choroidal thickness measurement and en-face visualization in patients with a variety of diseases, using a single high-resolution wide-field MHz-OCT dataset spanning more than 50 degrees field of view.
Methods
In this retrospective study, choroidal morphology of 29 patients imaged with MHz-OCT was assessed. MHz-OCT is a custom SS-OCT operating at 1060nm and an axial line rate of 1.68MHz. The high speed, more than 30 times faster than current commercial devices, enabled a very high resolution scan protocol of 2088x1024 A-scans over a wide field of ~60 degrees. However, due to the very high speed, signal strength is lower compared to slower devices. Hence, thickness and structure maps were only created for selected datasets: The positions of Bruch’s membrane and choroid sclera junction were determined manually by a trained observer a subset of all A-scans, from which thickness and intensity maps were created.
Results
Despite relative low signal strength, the choroid sclera junction could be clearly observed over the entire unshadowed image area in 15 of 29 patients. Apart from shadowing, visibility of this junction shows strong variation even within a single dataset due to varying retinal thickness, eye-blinks, saccades and retinal curvature. Thus, thickness could be evaluated at least in some areas for all 29 patients, especially in the periphery. Moreover, choroidal thickness varied considerably intra- and interindividually. In two patients, abrupt changes of the choroid were observed in the temporal periphery, which may resemble morphology or imaging artifact. In addition to thickness, en-face choroidal structure maps were extracted from the segmented OCT datasets. Visibility of choroidal vasculature in these maps correlates with choroidal thickness.
Conclusions
Choroidal thickness and structure in patients could be visualized over large areas for the first time. Due to focal choroidal thickness changes with large thickness gradients, high-density scan protocols may be favorable for OCT-based investigations of the choroid. En-face images of the choroid can be extracted from these high-resolution datasets, but the influence of choroidal thickness on the image information should be taken into account.
Keywords: 452 choroid •
552 imaging methods (CT, FA, ICG, MRI, OCT, RTA, SLO, ultrasound) •
550 imaging/image analysis: clinical