A quantitative sonoelastography evaluation of ocular and periocular elasticity after intravitreal ranibizumab injection

Abstract

We evaluated changes in ocular and periocular elasticity by ultrasound (US) elastography in intravitreal ranibizumab-treated eyes and the healthy fellow eyes of patients with neovascular AMD. The study was performed on 52 eyes of 26 volunteers who ranged in age from 59 to 89 (mean 72±7.78) years old. The study group consisted of the patients with neovascular AMD treated with intravitreal ranibizumab. The fellow eyes (without choroidal neovascularization) of the study group were selected as the control group. All patients were examined with sonoelastography before intravitreal injection and at 1day, 1week, and 1month after intravitreal injection. All images were acquired with a Toshiba Aplio 500 ultrasound system (Tokyo, Japan) including software with a combined autocorrelation method and a multifrequency linear probe. The elastography values of the anterior vitreous (AV), posterior vitreous (PV), retina-choroid-sclera complex (RCS), retrobulbar fat tissue (RF), optic nerve head (ONH) and retrobulbar optic nerve (RON) were measured in each eye. There were 13 male (50%) and 13 female (50%) participants in our study. Anterior vitreous, posterior vitreous, RCS, retrobulbar fat tissue, ONH, and RON US elastography values were similar in both groups (P˃0.05 for all). On the other hand, there was a positive correlation between the difference between baseline and 1-month PV sonoelastography values and age (r=0.47, P=0.035). A single dose intravitreal Ranibizumab (Lucentis®, Genentech, USA) injection does not alter the elasticity of ocular and periocular structures.