Influence of pseudophakic lens capsule opacification on spectral domain and time domain optical coherence tomography image quality.

PURPOSE

To evaluate the influence of posterior capsule opacification (PCO) on optical coherence tomography (OCT) acquisition of macular retinal thickness (RT) and volume using time domain OCT (TD-OCT) and spectral domain OCT (SD-OCT).

MATERIALS AND METHODS

We studied 37 eyes of 31 patients with PCO. Each patient underwent an evaluation with TD-OCT and with SD-OCT before and after Nd:YAG capsulotomy. We recorded RT and retinal volume in the macular area using only good quality images.

RESULTS

Best corrected visual acuity improved in all eyes after Nd:YAG capsulotomy, with the degree of improvement ranging from 0.3 ± 0.7 to 0.1 ±0.7 (p = 0.01). Before the treatment, only 27% of the examinations were valuable with TD-OCT, while using SD-OCT, it was possible to obtain an examination of suitable quality both before and after the Yag laser capsulotomy in 100% of the eyes. We did not observe significant differences between mean preoperative and postoperative RT and total macular volume measurements, neither with TD-OCT nor with SD-OCT. RT and total macular volume values obtained using TD-OCT were always lower than those obtained from the SD-OCT, both before and after capsulotomy.

CONCLUSIONS

Our study confirmed that with old generation TD-OCT, PCO has a strong negative influence on the quality of OCT acquisition, and examination is reliable only when it is possible to acquire good quality images. With new generation SD-OCT, tomographic acquisitions are always reliable and are not influenced by the presence of PCO.