No abstract

No abstract

Choroid thickness and volume estimated from optical coherence tomography (OCT) images have emerged as important metrics in disease management. This paper presents an automated three-dimensional (3-D) method for segmenting the choroid from 1 - ? m wide-view swept source OCT image volumes, including the Bruch’s membrane (BM) and the choroidal–scleral interface (CSI) segmentation. Two auxiliary boundaries are first detected by modified Canny operators and then the optical nerve head is detected and removed. The BM and the initial CSI segmentation are achieved by 3-D multiresolution graph search with gradient-based cost. The CSI is further refined by adding a regional cost, calculated from the wavelet-based gradual intensity distance. The segmentation accuracy is quantitatively evaluated on 32 normal eyes by comparing with manual segmentation and by reproducibility test. The mean choroid thickness difference from the manual segmentation is 19.16 ± 4.32 ?? ? m , the mean Dice similarity coefficient is 93.17 ± 1.30 % , and the correlation coefficients between fovea-centered volumes obtained on repeated scans are larger than 0.97.

Purpose: To evaluate the relationship between aqueous inflammation cytokines and cytomegalovirus (CMV) particles in patients with cytomegalovirus retinitis (CMVR), and evaluate the changes in aqueous inflammation cytokines during multiple intravitreal injections of antiviral drugs for CMVR. Methods: There were 10 patients (12 eyes; 16 courses of treatment per eye) who underwent continued intravitreal ganciclovir or foscarnet for treatment of CMVR. Before each intravitreal injection, 50-100 mL of aqueous humor was removed and sent to the laboratory to examine the concentration of the CMV DNA load by using polymerase chain reaction and to examine the concentration of interleukin (IL)-1b, IL-6, IL-8, IL-10, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-a, and IL-12p70 using a cytometric bead array. Results: A Kendall correlation test showed that the concentration of the CMV DNA load in the aqueous humor was significantly associated with the aqueous level of IL-6 (P < 0.001, r = 0.327) and IL-8 (P < 0.001, r = 0.381), but not significantly associated with IL-1b, IL-10, IL-12p70, and TNF-a. The boxplots showed that the concentration of the aqueous CMV DNA load, IL-8 and IL-10 continuously declined after multiple intravitreal injections of antiviral drugs, and the decline trend of IL-8 was most remarkable. IL-1b, IL-10, TNF-a, and IL12p70 were negative in some of the aqueous levels of CMVR patients throughout the course of treatment (25.0%-62.5%). Conclusions: Our study showed that IL-8 was significantly associated with the aqueous level of CMV copies and continuously declined during a course of treatment that involved multiple intravitreal injections of antiviral drugs. IL-8 may be considered a good quantitative laboratory indicator of the recovery of CMVR.