Objectives: To calculate the accuracy (A) and establish the best cutoff value for ophthalmic artery (OA) Doppler velocimetry indexes in patients diagnosed with preeclampsia (PE), compared with healthy pregnant women.
Methods: This prospective experimental study enrolled 268 women: 133 with PE and 135 healthy pregnant women. All patients were evaluated by OA Doppler sonography, bilaterally, to assess their pulsatility index (PI), resistance index (RI), peak systolic velocity (PVS), second peak systolic velocity (P2), end-diastolic velocity (EDV), and peak ratio (PR). Means were compared using Student's T-test. Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve was used to establish the cutoff value and estimate the sensitivity (S), specificity (Sp), accuracy (A) of all variables, and a significance of 95% was adopted.
Results: ROC curve analysis showed that P2 and PR were superior to the other parameters for PE diagnosis. We tested two cutoff values: (1) using PR ≥0.70, obtained A: 88.72%, S: 81.95%, and Sp: 95.48% and (2) using PR ≥0.75, and A: 86.24%, S: 74.43%, and Sp: 99.24%. By adopting P2 ≥ 21.5 cm/s, we obtained A: 87.59%, S: 84.96%, and Sp: 90.22% and when the cutoff point was P2 ≥ 22 cm/s, there was a slight decrease in A to 86.46% and S to 81.20%, with Sp: 91.89.3%.
Conclusion: Ophthalmic artery Doppler demonstrated to be an effective and high-performance imaging method for the diagnosis of PE and the indexes P2 and PR demonstrated superior accuracy to the other Doppler parameters assessed. Higher performance occurred when the cutoff values with greater specificity were adopted, PR ≥ 0.75 and P2 ≥ 22 cm/s, considering that the proposed OA Doppler is to be a complementary method for preeclampsia.
Keywords: Doppler; Ophthalmic artery; accuracy; preeclampsia; pregnancy.