Abstract
Purpose :
To determine the agreement between the traditional lid transillumination procedure and a novel optical coherence tomography (OCT) technique for the assessment of meibomian glands (MGs) morphology.
Methods :
Agreement between OCT and lid transillumination examination for the detection of drop-out (partial or complete loss of MGs) and microscopic changes (i.e. shortening, distortion, segmentation and entanglement) were evaluated in 41 patients with obstructive MGD (20 men, 21 women; age [mean ± standard deviation] 41.1 ± 8.1 years), and 45 control subjects (22 men, 23 women; 40.3 ± 7.5 years).
Results :
Overall agreement for all morphological features was substantial (Cohen kappa coefficient = 0.77; p<0.001),The majority of disagreement occurred for cases with segmentation, where agreement was present in only 82% of eyes with adequate images for interpretation, and where OCT tended to diagnose more cases not detected by traditional lid transillumination (McNemar test, p<0.001).
Conclusions :
Each method has its advantages but in general there was close agreement between these two meibographic techniques, particularly for MG dropout. These results support the reliability of our novel, simple and patient-friendly OCT technique of meibomian gland evaluation.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.