Abstract
Purpose :
To develop a quantitative method that enables to evaluate the degree of structural abnormalities by utilizing the reflectance differences of the ellipsoid zone (EZ) in OCT en-face image.
Methods :
We used a high-speed and high-resolution SS-OCT prototype system (Topcon Corp., Tokyo, Japan). The macular-centered 3D-OCT data was acquired with a size of 1.5×1.5 mm2 and a sampling resolution of 512×512 pixels. EZ en-face image was generated with approximately 15 um depth integration. To assess the EZ damage, an attenuation coefficients (AC) based method (Vermeer, BOE 2014) was applied to enable inter-measurement comparison in addition to reducing the projection artifacts. Black areas of the binarized en face image represent regions of suspected of EZ damage. The percentage of damaged EZ using this method is compared to another method based on relative EZ signal intensity with respect to retinal pigment epithelium signal intensity (EZ/RPE). The performance was evaluated using 32 eyes post-retinal detachment (RD) and their 32 fellow eyes.
Results :
Figure 1 shows an example of the B-scan images, AC-based enface images and binarized images. The percentages of regions suspected of EZ damage for RD and fellow eyes using EZ/RPE-based method were 60.2% and 41.6%, respectively. On the other hands, the percentage using AC-based method were 75.9% and 15.9%, respectively.
Conclusions :
The use of binarized AC-based OCT en-face images was superior in differentiating the degree of EZ damage. These results suggest the quantitative method to evaluate the microstructure damage of EZ.
This abstract was presented at the 2024 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, WA, May 5-9, 2024.