Department of Ophthalmology, Ibaraki Medical Center, Tokyo Medical University, 3-20-1 Chuo, Ami, Inashiki, Ibaraki, 300395, Japan.
Computational Optics Group, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan.
Sci Rep. 2022 Nov 16;12(1):19713. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-23874-7.
We investigated birefringence-derived scleral artifacts in optical coherence tomography (OCT) images of eyes with pathologic myopia. This study included 76 eyes of 42 patients with pathologic myopia. Five sets of OCT B-scan images of the macula were obtained using commercial swept-source OCT. A dataset of prototype swept-source polarization-diversity OCT images was used to identify polarization-dependent OCT images (i.e., complex averaging of OCT signals from two polarization channels) and polarization-independent OCT images (i.e., intensity averaging of two OCT signals). Polarization-dependent OCT images and commercial OCT images were assessed for the presence of birefringence-derived artifacts by comparison with polarization-independent OCT images. Both polarization-dependent OCT images and commercial OCT images contained scleral vessel artifacts. Scleral vessel artifacts were present in 46 of 76 eyes (60.5%) imaged by polarization-dependent OCT and 17 of 76 eyes (22.4%) imaged by commercial OCT. The proportion of images that showed scleral vessel artifacts was significantly greater among polarization-dependent OCT images than among commercial OCT images (P < 0.001). Additionally, polarization-dependent OCT images showed low-intensity band artifacts. This study demonstrated the existence of birefringence-derived scleral artifacts in commercial OCT images and indicated that polarization-diversity OCT is an effective tool to evaluate the presence of these artifacts.
我们研究了病理性近视患者的光学相干断层扫描(OCT)图像中的双折射衍生的巩膜伪影。这项研究包括 42 名病理性近视患者的 76 只眼睛。使用商业扫频源 OCT 获得了 5 组黄斑 OCT B 扫描图像。使用原型扫频源偏振分集 OCT 图像数据集来识别偏振相关 OCT 图像(即来自两个偏振通道的 OCT 信号的复平均)和偏振无关 OCT 图像(即两个 OCT 信号的强度平均)。通过与偏振无关的 OCT 图像进行比较,评估偏振相关的 OCT 图像和商业 OCT 图像中是否存在双折射衍生的伪影。偏振相关的 OCT 图像和商业 OCT 图像都包含巩膜血管伪影。偏振相关 OCT 图像中,46 只眼(60.5%)存在巩膜血管伪影,商业 OCT 图像中,17 只眼(22.4%)存在巩膜血管伪影。偏振相关 OCT 图像中显示巩膜血管伪影的图像比例明显高于商业 OCT 图像(P<0.001)。此外,偏振相关 OCT 图像还显示出低强度带伪影。本研究证明了商业 OCT 图像中存在双折射衍生的巩膜伪影,并表明偏振分集 OCT 是评估这些伪影存在的有效工具。