Abstract
Purpose :
The current gold standard in diagnosis and management of patients with choroidal neovascularization (CNV) due to pathologic myopia are funduscopy, SD-OCT and fluorescein angiography (FA).
Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCT-A) is a novel, non-invasive technique that allows detailed imaging of the dynamic blood flow within the microvasculature of the retina and choroid. We evaluated the use of OCT-A as a diagnostic tool to detect myopic CNV and analysed its diagnostic power compared to the previous standard method FA.
Methods :
Twenty-one eyes of twenty-one patients with CNV due to pathologic myopia (>6 diopters and > 26mm axial length) were included in this study and received multimodal imaging. Funduscopy, SD-OCT, FA and OCT-A were performed in all patients. The images of SD-OCT and OCT-A as well as the images of SD-OCT and FA were analysed and evaluated separately by two blinded reviewers. Their results, i.e. detection of CNV in SD-OCT/OCT-A vs. SD-OCT/FA, were compared for diagnostic accuracy.
Results :
OCT-A images with sufficient quality for CNV assessment were obtained for all twenty-one patients (6 males, 15 females; mean age: 63.7 ± 14.2 years; mean spherical equivalent: -11.1 ± 4.7 diopters; mean axial length: 28.9 ± 2.0mm). SD-OCT/OCT-A detected CNV in seventeen of twenty-one eyes (81.0%), while SD-OCT/FA detected CNV in all twenty-one eyes (100%).
Conclusions :
OCT-A is highly useful as additional diagnostic tool in patients with CNV due to pathologic myopia. The results of this study show that OCT-A may replace FA as one of the main diagnostic tools for myopic CNV in the majority of cases. Further research is necessary to define the role of OCT-A in the assessment of myopic CNV and other retinovascular diseases.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.