Longitudinal OCT texture analysis to assess the retinal changes in the triple‐transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

AbstractPurpose: This study aimed to investigate whether texture from optical coherence tomography (OCT) can address Alzheimer's disease (AD)‐related changes in the retina by evaluating differences to the wild‐type (WT) control group over time.Methods: The study included OCT data of WT mice and its age‐matched transgenic mice of AD (3xTg‐AD). Animals were imaged monthly from 1 month old up to 4 months old and at the ages of 8‐, 12‐, and 16 months old. Neuro‐retinal layers were analysed using various texture metrics, assuming that these could convey different views of unfolding changes. Two hundred forty texture metrics were computed from local binary patterns and some variants, local phase quantisation, wavelet features, and Gabor filters. The discriminative potential of the texture metrics was evaluated using the non‐parametric Mann–Whitney test with a 5% significance level at each age to determine the consistency in the texture difference between groups over time. The trajectories of the texture measurements of the WT and AD mice were compared to analyse the trends over time.Results: Texture metrics showing differences between the WT and AD groups from a time‐point onwards were found for all neuro‐retinal layers, with the retinal nerve fibre layer (RNFL) presenting the most significant number of metrics in these conditions. The most relevant differences between groups were found at 2 months old, while few metrics presented differences from 8 months old onwards. Consequently, this study demonstrated that texture metrics discriminate retinas of AD mice from the WT group based on OCT data. Furthermore, this study also demonstrated the parallel path of changes over time in both groups, with the vast majority of the metrics presenting the same type of variation with time.Conclusions: This study emphasizes the potential of the texture information in the OCT images to address AD‐related changes in the retina. We presented longitudinal texture analysis of WT and transgenic mice, where the texture differences were found at the youngest age of the study (1 month) and preserved the differences over the 16‐months study period. Those differences showed the same evolutionary trend for both groups.