Quantitative imaging of retinal pigment epithelial detachments using spectral-domain optical coherence tomography.

PURPOSE

To evaluate the reproducibility of area and volume measurements of retinal pigment epithelium detachments (PEDs) in eyes of patients with age-related macular degeneration using spectral-domain optical coherence tomography imaging and a novel automated, quantitative algorithm.

DESIGN

Prospective study to evaluate a diagnostic technology.

METHODS

Patients with PEDs associated with age-related macular degeneration underwent spectral-domain optical coherence tomography imaging. Each eye was imaged 5 times, and each scan consisted of a raster pattern comprising 40 000 uniformly spaced A-scans organized as a 200 × 200 A-scan array. Each raster scan covered a retinal area of 6 × 6 mm encompassing the entire PED. A novel algorithm was used to create PED maps that permitted both qualitative and quantitative assessment of PED area and volume. Test-retest standard deviations of PED area and volume measurements were calculated for each eye.

RESULTS

Sixty-three eyes of 58 patients were enrolled in this study. The qualitative appearance and the quantitative measurements of PED area and volume were highly reproducible over the 5 different datasets obtained from each eye. The intraclass correlation coefficient was more than 0.99 for both area and volume measurements obtained using the entire dataset.

CONCLUSIONS

A novel algorithm for the qualitative and quantitative assessment of PEDs imaged using spectral-domain optical coherence tomography was shown to be highly reproducible. The ability to measure PED area and volume reliably represents a novel strategy for following disease progression, especially when assessing the response of vascularized PEDs to antiangiogenic therapy.