Quantitative artery-vein analysis in optical coherence tomography angiography of diabetic retinopathy

摘要

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) and other eye diseases can affect artery and vein differently. Therefore, differential artery-veinanalysis can improve disease detection and treatment assessment. This study aims to establish color fundus imageanalysis guided artery-vein differentiation in OCTA, and to verify that differential artery-vein analysis can improve thesensitivity of OCTA detection and classification of DR. Briefly, optical density ratio (ODR) analysis and blood vesseltracking were combined to identify artery-vein in color fundus images. The fundus artery-vein map was used to registerarteries and veins in corresponding OCTA images. Based on the fundus image guided artery-vein differentiation,quantitative analysis of arteries and veins in control and NPDR OCTA images were performed. The sensitivities oftraditional mean blood vessel caliber (m-BVC) and artery-vein ratio of BVC (AVR-BVC) were quantitatively comparedfor DR classification. One way, multi-label analysis of variance (ANOVA) with Bonferroni’s test and Student t-test wasemployed for evaluating classification performance. Images from 20 eyes of 18 control subjects and 48 eyes of 35 NPDRpatients (18 mild, 16 moderate and 14 severe NPDR) were used for this study. Compared to m-BVC, AVR-BVCprovided enhanced sensitivity in differentiating NPDR stages. AVR-BVC was able to differentiate among control andthree different NPDR groups. AVR-BVC could also differentiate control from mild NPDR, promising a unique OCTAbiomarker for detecting early onset of NPDR.