Abstract
Purpose :
Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) offers a novel method to image retinal vascular diseases including retinal vein occlusions. We performed a retrospective clinical study to identify and compare areas of non-perfusion seen on OCTA to the vasculature visualized on en face spectral domain optical coherence tomography (en face OCT).
Methods :
This study included a total of 21 eyes, 11 eyes with central retinal vein occlusions and 10 eyes with branch retinal vein occlusions. A masked observer examined the en face OCT, OCTA and fluorescein angiography (FA). We identified areas with vessels seen on en face OCT that were non-perfused on OCTA and correlated these areas with findings at the corresponding location in OCT scans and on FA.
Results :
Of the eyes studied, 17 had discordance between the vasculature seen on OCTA and en face SD-OCT. Of the eyes with CRVO, 8 had visible vessels on SD-OCT in areas of non-perfusion on OCTA while the remaining 3 cases of CRVO had no visible vessels on en face OCT in areas of non-perfusion on OCTA. Nine of the ten cases of BRVO similarly had persistent vessels on en face OCT in areas which showed non-perfusion on OCTA.
Conclusions :
Our findings indicate a wide range of variations in the abnormalities on OCTA and en face OCT in non-perfused vessels. Comparison of these discrepancies to FA confirm that non-perfusion on OCTA corresponds to FA non-perfusion. Our findings demonstrate that OCTA precisely delineates areas of non-perfusion. Clinicians should consider multimodality imaging when evaluating BRVO and CRVO.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2017 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Baltimore, MD, May 7-11, 2017.