Purpose: To investigate the impact of penetration and image analysis in different optical coherence tomography (OCT) instruments on the measurement of choroidal vascularity parameters.
Methods: Twenty-three healthy volunteers were imaged using two swept-source OCTs and one spectral-domain OCT. A fully automatic segmentation method based on ResNet-UNet and Niblack local threshold binarization was performed to quantify the relevant choroidal vascular parameters, including choroidal vascularity index, total choroidal volume, and luminal volume. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and coefficient of repeatability (COR) were used to analyze the repeatability and consistency of automatic and manual segmentation, respectively.
Results: Both swept-source OCT devices showed good consistency of luminal volume and total choroidal volume measurements (all ICC value >0.98 with COR% < 8.53%) based on manual segmentation, whereas the consistency of the spectral-domain OCT was lower (ICC value <0.60 with COR% > 40%), which was greatly improved after using the automatic algorithm (ICC value >0.99 with COR% < 4%). The repeatability of choroidal vascularity index obtained from different OCT images using manual or automatic segmentation showed good agreement (all ICC values >0.85), whereas the choroidal vascularity index measurement from the spectral-domain OCT was larger than the other two swept-source OCT devices (ICC value <0.65).
Conclusion: For healthy youngsters, the penetration of OCT plays a role in the measurement precision for choroidal vascularity parameters, and automatic segmentation can improve the ability of choroidal boundary identification with deficient penetration, suggesting these factors need to be considered in clinical work.