研究目的
To perform a systematic literature review to assess the percentage of articles that report correcting the scale of their OCTA images for individual differences in retinal magnification.
研究成果
A formal literature review was conducted of studies that used OCTA retinal imaging and required correct lateral scaling for the reported analyses. We determined the number of articles that reported using correctly scaled OCTA images, from which we found that up to 92.0% did not appear to do so. Therefore, readers should proceed with caution when interpreting such studies. Where axial length measurements are not available, authors could report measurements in angular units (eg, arcmin and degrees) instead of linear units (eg, micrometers and millimeters) or use Monte Carlo simulations to model the possible outcome of scaling differences on their analyses and conclusions.
研究不足
One limitation of this study is that we emphasized the use of axial length to correct the lateral scale of the images. Refractive error is known to be correlated with axial length, so using a correction based on refractive error could be better than no correction at all. This is an important point, because even axial length provides an incomplete picture of retinal magnification. Complete ocular biometry measurements (including corneal curvature and anterior chamber depth) are available and could be used, but even still, there are differences in the optical models used to estimate image magnification of the human eye. Thus, while knowledge of the lateral scale of a retinal image is often required to make certain measurements from the image, there is no agreed-on way in which to compute the scale.
