Abstract
Purpose: To investigate the thickness changes of outer retinal layers in subjects with white matter hyperintensities (WMH) and Parkinson's Disease (PD).Methods: 56 eyes from 31 patients with WMH, 11 eyes from 6 PD patients, and 58 eyes from 32 healthy controls (HC) were enrolled in this study. A macular-centered scan was conducted on each participant using a spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) device. After speckle noise reduction, a state-of-the-art deep learning method (i.e., a context encoder network) was employed to segment the outer retinal layers from OCT B-scans. Thickness quantification of the outer retinal layers was conducted on the basis of the segmentation results.Results: WMH patients had significantly thinner Henle fiber layers, outer nuclear layers (HFL+ONL) and photoreceptor outer segments (OS) than HC (p = 0.031, and p = 0.005), while PD patients showed a significant increase of mean thickness in the interdigitation zone and the retinal pigment epithelium/Bruch complex (IZ+RPE) (19.619 ± 4.626) compared to HC (17.434 ± 1.664). There were no significant differences in the thickness of the outer plexiform layer (OPL), the myoid and ellipsoid zone (MEZ), and the IZ+RPE layer between WMH and HC subjects. Similarly, there were also no obvious differences in the thickness of the OPL, HFL+ONL, MEZ and the OS layer between PD and HC subjects.Conclusion: Thickness changes in HFL+ONL, OS, and IZ+RPE layers may correlate with brain-related diseases such as WMH and PD. Further longitudinal study is needed to confirm HFL+ONL/OS/IZ+RPE layer thickness as potential biomarkers for detecting certain brain-related diseases.
Highlights
White matter, gray matter and substantia nigra are three important components of the central nervous system
In the joint thickness of HFL and outer plexiform layer (OPL), there is a significant difference (p = 0.031) between the white matter hyperintensities (WMH), Parkinson’s disease (PD) and healthy controls (HC) groups, while the myoid and ellipsoid zone (MEZ) thickness shows a significant difference between the three groups (p = 0.042)
We evaluated the thickness of the outer retina in different groups, FIGURE 4 | The en-face retinal layer thickness maps of four cases from the WMH, PD and HC groups, respectively. (A,B) show the thickness distribution difference of the outer segments (OS) layer between the HC and WMH groups. (C,D) show the thickness distribution difference of the IZ+RPE layer between the HC and PD groups
Summary
Gray matter and substantia nigra are three important components of the central nervous system. There exists strong evidence showing that white matter hyperintensities (WMH) is an important clinical markers of several brain diseases, such as stroke, dementia, in both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies (Balakrishnan et al, 2021; Song et al, 2021). Efficient detection of hyperintense lesions in cerebral white matter and substantia nigra damage is of potential importance in the further study of diseases of the brain. A structural MRI (Zhuang et al, 2017) can be used for quantitative calculation of the volume of brain tissue for the diagnosis of WMH, while diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) (Etherton et al, 2017, 2019) is used to detect early microstructural changes in white matter. Carotid ultrasound, cerebral angiogram, and echocardiogram have been used to identify WMH
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