Combining Optical Coherence Tomography and Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography Longitudinal Data for the Detection of Visual Field Progression in Glaucoma

Abstract

To use longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) and OCT angiography (OCTA) data to detect glaucomatous visual field (VF) progression with a supervised machine learning approach. Prospective cohort study. One hundred ten eyes of patients with suspected glaucoma (33.6%) and patients with glaucoma (66.4%) with a minimum of 5 24-2 VF tests and 3 optic nerve head and macula images over an average follow-up duration of 4.1 years were included. VF progression was defined using a composite measure including either a "likely progression event" on Guided Progression Analysis, a statistically significant negative slope of VF mean deviation or VF index, or a positive pointwise linear regression event. Feature-based gradient boosting classifiers were developed using different subsets of baseline and longitudinal OCT and OCTA summary parameters. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) was used to compare the classification performance of different models. VF progression was detected in 28 eyes (25.5%). The model with combined baseline and longitudinal OCT and OCTA parameters at the global and hemifield levels had the best classification accuracy to detect VF progression (AUROC=0.89). Models including combined OCT and OCTA parameters had higher classification accuracy compared with those with individual subsets of OCT or OCTA features alone. Including hemifield measurements significantly improved the models' classification accuracy compared with using global measurements alone. Including longitudinal rates of change of OCT and OCTA parameters (AUROCs=0.80-0.89) considerably increased the classification accuracy of the models with baseline measurements alone (AUROCs=0.60-0.63). Longitudinal OCTA measurements complement OCT-derived structural metrics for the evaluation of functional VF loss in patients with glaucoma.