Abstract
Purpose :
Difficulty in determining Plus Disease (PD) in eyes with Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) is well documented. This study is to evaluate the confidence with which ROP experts were able to identify PD or Pre-PD among images that were categorized as borderline PD by an experienced non-physician reader.
Methods :
Nine disc center images were selected by an experienced non-physician e-ROP- certified grader that were judged morphologically to be between a definite PD and a definite pre-PD. These images were independently evaluated by 10 e-ROP-certified ophthalmologists (ROP experts) who have extensive experience in the clinical diagnosis and treatment of ROP, for the presence of PD or pre-PD with an assessment of confidence from 1-10 (1 being not at all certain and 10 being completely certain). See Figure 1.
Results :
The results are shown in Table 1. Among 5 e-ROP images identified as PD by both clinical examination and reading center image evaluation, one image was identified as pre-PD by one expert, another as pre-PD by two experts and a third image as pre-PD by seven experts. Among 2 images identified as pre-PD by both clinical exam and image evaluation, one was identified as PD by three experts but with low confidence. An image identified as pre-PD by image evaluation and normal by clinical exam was judged to be PD by 2 clinicians.
Conclusions :
Difficulty exists even among ROP experts in identifying plus, especially in borderline cases.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2017 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Baltimore, MD, May 7-11, 2017.