Widefield OCT Imaging for Quantifying Inner Retinal Thickness in the Nonhuman Primate.

PURPOSE: To determine the agreement and repeatability of inner retinal thickness measures from widefield imaging compared to standard scans in healthy nonhuman primates.

METHODS

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans were acquired from 30 healthy rhesus monkeys, with 11 animals scanned at multiple visits. The scan protocol included 20° × 20° raster scans centered on the macula and optic nerve head (ONH), a 12° diameter circular scan centered on the ONH, and a 55 × 45° widefield raster scan. Each scan was segmented using custom neural network-based algorithms. Bland-Altman analysis were used for comparing average circumpapillary retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness and ganglion cell inner plexiform layer (GCIPL) thickness for a 16° diameter region. Comparisons were also made for similar 1° × 1° superpixels from the raster scans.

RESULTS

Average circumpapillary RNFL thickness from the circular scan was 114.2 ± 5.8 µm, and 113.2 ± 7.3 µm for an interpolated scan path from widefield imaging (bias = -1.03 µm, 95% limits of agreement [LOA] -8.6 to 6.5 µm). GCIPL thickness from standard raster scans was 72.7 ± 4.3 µm, and 73.7 ± 3.7 µm from widefield images (bias = 1.0 µm, 95% LOA -2.4 to 4.4 µm). Repeatability for both RNFL and GCIPL standard analysis was less than 5.2 µm. For 1° × 1° superpixels, the 95% limits of agreement were between -13.9 µm and 13.7 µm for RNFL thickness and -2.5 µm and 2.5 µm for GCIPL thickness.

CONCLUSIONS

Inner retinal thickness measures from widefield imaging have good repeatability and are comparable to those measured using standard scans.

TRANSLATIONAL RELEVANCE: Monitoring retinal ganglion cell loss in the non-human primate experimental glaucoma model could be enhanced using widefield imaging.