Purpose: The purpose of this study was to quantify choroidal vessels (CVs) in pathological eyes in three dimensions (3D) using optical coherence tomography (OCT) and a deep-learning analysis.
Methods: A single-center retrospective study including 34 eyes of 34 patients (7 women and 27 men) with treatment-naïve central serous chorioretinopathy (CSC) and 33 eyes of 17 patients (7 women and 10 men) with Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada disease (VKH) or sympathetic ophthalmitis (SO) were imaged consecutively between October 2012 and May 2019 with a swept source OCT. Seventy-seven eyes of 39 age-matched volunteers (26 women and 13 men) with no sign of ocular pathology were imaged for comparison. Deep-learning-based image enhancement pipeline enabled CV segmentation and visualization in 3D, after which quantitative vessel volume maps were acquired to compare normal and diseased eyes and to track the clinical course of eyes in the disease group. Region-based vessel volumes and vessel indices were utilized for disease diagnosis.
Results: OCT-based CV volume maps disclose regional CV changes in patients with CSC, VKH, or SO. Three metrics, (i) choroidal volume, (ii) CV volume, and (iii) CV index, exhibit high sensitivity and specificity in discriminating pathological choroids from healthy ones.
Conclusions: The deep-learning analysis of OCT images described here provides a 3D visualization of the choroid, and allows quantification of features in the datasets to identify choroidal disease and distinguish between different diseases.
Translational relevance: This novel analysis can be applied retrospectively to existing OCT datasets, and it represents a significant advance toward the automated diagnosis of choroidal pathologies based on observations and quantifications of the vasculature.