Abstract
Purpose To quantitatively investigate the macular retinal light reflection characteristic using optical property indices derived from spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) scans with depth attenuation compensation for pituitary adenoma. Methods This study included 38 patients (mean age 44.66 ± 13.77 years old) with diagnosis of pituitary adenoma and 43 age-matched controls. All SD-OCT scans were light attenuation compensated by a depth-resolved model. Attenuation coefficient, the corrected intensity, and the retinal layer thickness were deduced for macular retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) and ganglion cell layer combined with inner plexiform layer (GCIPL), as well as comparing between patients and controls by statistical methods. Results Attenuation coefficients of RNFL and GCIPL among patients were significantly lower compared to the controls with P values equal to or less than 0.001. The mean values of the corrected optical intensity were decreased in the patients without universally significant differences. Significant decreases in thickness existing in the RNFL of patients, especially in the superonasal (SN) quadrant and inferonasal (IN) quadrant (decrease ratio = 9.64% and 13.02%, both with P < 0.001). The thickness of RNFL was significantly associated with the attenuation coefficient (standardized beta = 0.335, P=0.002). The performances of attenuation coefficient were better than the corrected optical intensity and the thickness (the values of the areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves = 0.751 and 0.758, both with P < 0.001) in discriminating pituitary adenoma patients from controls. Conclusions The retinal light reflection characteristics were debilitated in patients with pituitary adenoma. The potential of attenuation coefficients of RNFL and GCIPL in distinguishing patients with pituitary adenoma from controls was validated by the comparison of the derived optical property indices.
Highlights
Visual dysfunction induced by pituitary adenoma is attributed to the damage to retinal ganglion cells (RGC) through the compression or blood supply interference acting on the optic chiasm [1, 2]
We quantitatively investigated the retinal light reflection characteristics in the patients with pituitary adenomas using attenuation coefficient, the corrected intensity, and the retinal layer thickness derived from the spectral-domain Optical coherence tomography (OCT) (SD-OCT) scans with depth attenuation compensation based on a single scattering model. e abilities to distinguish between the patients with pituitary adenomas and controls were compared to the attenuation coefficient, the corrected intensity, and the retinal layer thickness
Macula centered OCT volumes were acquired for one eye using a standard 6 × 6 mm2 protocol, with 256 B-scan slices in each three-dimensional (3D) acquisition. e OCT image size was 992 × 512 × 256 voxels, with a resolution of 2.62 × 11.72 × 23.44 μm3. e raw scanned data were exported from the OCT machine in .fds file format and were interpreted as 16-bit grayscale images resulting in 65,536 levels of gray expressed in arbitrary units (AU). e effectiveness of image analysis was ensured by eliminating defective images, such as those with eye movements and black bands throughout or other appearances that would impact the subsequent analysis
Summary
Visual dysfunction induced by pituitary adenoma is attributed to the damage to retinal ganglion cells (RGC) through the compression or blood supply interference acting on the optic chiasm [1, 2]. Image intensity based morphological and optical properties are the common focused issues in the retinal study. E morphological quantitative measurements reflect the thicknesses or shapes of the retinal layers. Light reflectivity of the retinal layer demonstrating different image optical intensities can be viewed as signs of tissue pathophysiologic changes, especially in intraretinal spaces, which sometimes do not show thickness changes [5, 6]. Using optical scattering properties can achieve reliable measurement of the changes involved in retinal pathological processes [6,7,8]
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