Original ArticleEffect of Corneal Drying on Optical Coherence Tomography
Section snippets
Patients and Methods
Healthy volunteers were enrolled in this prospective study. Institutional review board and ethics committee approval was obtained for the study, and all participants gave their informed consent to participate in the study. The study followed the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki.
Each participant underwent a full medical and ocular history, and a detailed ocular examination was performed, including visual acuity and slit-lamp and fundus examinations.
The healthy volunteers were recruited
Results
Seventeen healthy participants were enrolled in the study. The mean age of the group was 39±12 years. Six of the participants were male, and 6 of the 17 eyes (35%) were right eyes. All participants underwent a fluorescein staining examination, with no surface abnormalities or staining irregularities. Mean BUTs for all participants was 13.9±5.5 seconds. All participants were scanned to at least 80 seconds of drying time. The number of scans of sufficient quality to calculate NFL thickness
Discussion
The study evaluated the effect of extended corneal exposure, with resulting corneal drying, on the quality of OCT scans and the quantitative measurements obtained by those scans. Prolonged corneal exposure led to significant reduction both in scan quality and NFL thickness measurements (Table 1; Figure 4, Figure 5). The reduction in scan quality led to a substantial decrease in the percentage of scans that qualified for analysis (Fig 3).
The SNR sharply declined at the early stages of the drying
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Cited by (0)
Manuscript no. 2005-667.
Drs Stein and Wollstein shared equally in preparation of the manuscript.
Supported in part by the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland (grant nos.: R01-EY013178-6, P30-EY008098); The Eye and Ear Foundation, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and an unrestricted grant from Research to Prevent Blindness, Inc., New York, New York.
Dr Schuman receives royalties for intellectual property licensed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Carl Zeiss Meditec, Inc.