Quantitative assessment of depolarization by the retinal pigment epithelium in healthy and glaucoma subjects measured over a large field of view

Motschi, Alice; Schwarzhans, Florian; Desissaire, Sylvia; Steiner, Stefan H.; Bogunović, Hrvoje; Roberts, Philipp; Vass, Clemens; Hitzenberger, Christoph K.; Pircher, Michael

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0278679

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 35 publications

(55 reference statements)

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“…The number of subjects recruited in our study closely matches those from one of the most recent glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy clinical studies 39 . Indeed, there are some studies performed with PS-OCT that include more subjects, but these studies only performed experiments on patient eyes 40,41 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trans-ocular hypertension assessment

Afsharan

Anilkumar

Silva

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Blood vessel walls are made of organized fibrous tissue with intrinsic birefringence. Even in its very early stages, hypertension can change the structure of a blood vessel wall. We showed that this structural change can be quantitatively measured non-invasively in the human retina using polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT). Organizational loss in vessel wall tissue was quantified in hypertensive patients and compared to data obtained from age-matched healthy subjects. The wall tissue in patients with hypertension was shown to be thicker, and exhibited lower birefringence, presumably due to a loss of tissue organization. The blood vessel wall birefringence index (BBI) combines vessel wall birefringence and thickness into one number and is introduced here to readily distinguish between blood vessel walls of hypertensive and healthy subjects. Based on receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, BBI showed 99% sensitivity and 100% specificity when discriminating normotensive (N = 11) and hypertensive (N = 11) subjects. Accurately determining the thickness of the blood vessel wall is not possible without polarization-sensitivity. Moreover, just blood vessel wall thickness or wall birefringence were not sufficient to achieve this high classification performance. Retinal vessel wall measurements with PS-OCT cannot be affected by a patient being anxious, by hormones or other blood values, since the measurement is intrinsic to the optical and mechanical properties of the vessel wall. Furthermore, this relatively low-cost system combines a very short imaging and analysis time with high sensitivity and specificity, making it highly suitable for low-cost screening.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trans-ocular hypertension assessment

Afsharan

Anilkumar

Silva

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The number of subjects recruited in our study closely matches those from one of the most recent glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy clinical studies [ 62 ]. Indeed, there are some studies performed with PS-OCT that include more subjects, but these studies only performed experiments on patient eyes [ 63 , 64 ]. However, a next study should include more patients with stages ranging from virgin diabetics or diabetic suspects to end-stage diabetics to understand the distribution of BBI at various stages of the disease.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Non-Invasive Retinal Blood Vessel Wall Measurements with Polarization-Sensitive Optical Coherence Tomography for Diabetes Assessment: A Quantitative Study

et al. 2023

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Diabetes affects the structure of the blood vessel walls. Since the blood vessel walls are made of birefringent organized tissue, any change or damage to this organization can be evaluated using polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT). In this paper, we used PS-OCT along with the blood vessel wall birefringence index (BBI = thickness/birefringence2) to non-invasively assess the structural integrity of the human retinal blood vessel walls in patients with diabetes and compared the results to those of healthy subjects. PS-OCT measurements revealed that blood vessel walls of diabetic patients exhibit a much higher birefringence while having the same wall thickness and therefore lower BBI values. Applying BBI to diagnose diabetes demonstrated high accuracy (93%), sensitivity (93%) and specificity (93%). PS-OCT measurements can quantify small changes in the polarization properties of retinal vessel walls associated with diabetes, which provides researchers with a new imaging tool to determine the effects of exercise, medication, and alternative diets on the development of diabetes.

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