Comparison of retinal layer intensity profiles from different OCT devices

Area of Science:

• Ophthalmology
• Medical Imaging
• Biomedical Engineering

Background:

• Spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) is crucial for retinal imaging.
• Variations in SD-OCT devices can affect retinal layer intensity measurements.
• Consistent and comparable data across devices is essential for clinical research and diagnosis.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare retinal layer intensity profiles between different SD-OCT devices.
• To evaluate the impact of normalization on inter-device intensity profile comparisons.
• To assess the efficacy of automated retinal layer segmentation for device comparison.

Main Methods:

• Employed a graph-based multistage automated segmentation approach to identify 11 retinal layer boundaries.
• Analyzed horizontal SD-OCT B-scans from two different devices (four acquisition protocols) in 34 healthy eyes.
• Compared mean layer intensities within and between devices, both before and after normalization against vitreous and RPE bands.

Main Results:

• Retinal layer intensity profiles showed similar morphology within each SD-OCT device.
• Significant differences in unnormalized mean layer intensities were observed between the two devices (P = .02 to .03).
• After normalization, inter-device differences in mean layer intensities became non-significant (P = .26 to .51), with high linear regression correlation (R(2) = 0.98).

Conclusions:

• Automated retinal layer segmentation enables robust comparison of intensity profiles.
• Normalization is critical for standardizing and comparing retinal layer intensity data across different SD-OCT devices.
• The findings support the use of normalization to mitigate inter-device variability in SD-OCT studies.