Development and Validation of Retinal Vasculature Nomogram in Suspected Angina Due to Coronary Artery Disease

To develop and validate a nomogram using retinal vasculature features and clinical variables to predict coronary artery disease (CAD) in patients with suspected angina.

The prediction model consisting of 795 participants was developed in a training set of 508 participants with suspected angina due to CAD, and data were collected from January 2018 to June 2019. The held-out validation was conducted with 287 consecutive patients from July 2019 to November 2019. All patients with suspected CAD received optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) examination before undergoing coronary CT angiography. LASSO regression model was used for data reduction and feature selection. Multivariable logistic regression analysis was used to develop the retinal vasculature model for predicting the probability of the presence of CAD.

Three potential OCTA parameters including vessel density of the nasal and temporal perifovea in the superficial capillary plexus and vessel density of the inferior parafovea in the deep capillary plexus were further selected as independent retinal vasculature predictors. Model clinical electrocardiogram (ECG) OCTA (clinical variables＋ECG＋OCTA) was presented as the individual prediction nomogram, with good discrimination (AUC of 0.942 [95% CI, 0.923-0.961] and 0.897 [95% CI, 0.861-0.933] in the training and held-out validation sets, respectively) and good calibration. Decision curve analysis indicated the clinical applicability of this retinal vasculature nomogram.

The presented retinal vasculature nomogram based on individual probability can accurately identify the presence of CAD, which could improve patient selection and diagnostic yield of aggressive testing before determining a diagnosis.