Clinical application of optical coherence tomography for evaluating visual function in patients with pituitary tumor

Abstract

Pituitary tumor is a kind of benign tumor which originates from epithelium of adenohypophysis, the patients of which have different degerees of visual field loss and visual acuity decrease, and corresponding fundus changes because of the specificity of its location. The visual function damage will vary a lot due to the position of the tumor. Ocular examinations that are relevant to pituitary tumor patients include visual field(VF) test, optical coherence tomography(OCT), visual evoked potential(VEP) and so on, with the former two uesed more. The thickness of parapapillary retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) and macular ganglion cells complex(GCC) in pituitary patient become thiner than healthy group, and the degree of the two changes are relative to the visual function recovery. Besides, OCT tests are becoming much more focused because its convenience and objectivity. We aimed at comparing the reports on this published in recent years, and focused on how the visual function examination works in detecting the change of the visual function in pituitary tumor patients.(Int Rev Ophthalmol, 2017, 41: 174-180) Key words: pituitary tumor; visual function examinations; optical coherence tomography