Abstract
Purpose :
Shaffer grading is considered the gold standard grading scale used during gonioscopy examination to assess angle opening. This study assessed the inter-examiner agreement between examiners evaluating Shaffer grades during gonioscopy in patients with open-angle glaucoma (OAG) and/or ocular hypertension (OHT).
Methods :
This study was performed at 3 glaucoma specialty centers on 100 patients with OAG or OHT. At each site, gonioscopy of the inferior angle of one eye of each patient was performed by two examiners who were masked to each other’s results and Shaffer grades were reported. Cohen’s kappa (weighted)[1], measuring agreement between the pairs of examiners, were determined.
Results :
Across all sites, examiners showed a 60% (60/100) agreement in Shaffer grade readings, 37% (37/100) of readings had a difference of 1 grade, and 3% (3/100) had a 2-grade difference. The weighted kappa value indicated moderate inter-examiner agreement (κ = 0.48). Furthermore, inter-examiner agreement at individual sites is shown in Table 1.
Conclusions :
The Shaffer grading system is widely used to gonioscopically determine angle width. Our results indicate that there may be variability between examiners across sites when performing Shaffer grading. A more quantitative method for assessing angle width, such as anterior segment optical coherence tomography (AS-OCT), may be considered for improved accuracy.
References
[1] Landis, J., & Koch, G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics 33 (1), 159-174.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.