Reliability and reproducibility of spectral and time domain optical coherence tomography images before and after correction for patients with age-related macular degeneration

PURPOSE To evaluate the reproducibility and reliability of Optical Coherence Tomography scans (OCT) obtained using the Time Domain (TD-OCT) StratusTM OCT, and the Spectral Domain (SD-OCT) SpectralisTM and CirrusTM OCT devices before and after manual correction in eyes with either Neovascular (NV-AMD) or Non-Neovascular (NNV-AMD) Age-related Macular Degeneration. METHODS We conducted a prospective observational study of 36 patients (50 eyes) with NV-AMD or NNV-AMD at a university-based retina practice. OCT scans were taken simultaneously using one TD-OCT and two SD-OCT devices. Macular thickness measurements were assessed before and after correction of the OCT algorithm by constructing Bland-Altman plots for agreement and calculating intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) and coefficients of repeatability (COR) to evaluate intraclass repeatability. RESULTS The Spectralis device had the highest number of images needing manual correction. All machines had high ICCs, with Spectralis having the highest. Bland-Altman plots indicated that there was low agreement between both Cirrus™ and Stratus™ and Spectralis™ and Stratus™, while there was good agreement between the Cirrus™ and Spectralis™ devices. The CORs were lowest for SpectralisTM and similar with each other and had higher values for CirrusTM and StratusTM. Agreement, CORs, and ICCs generally improved after manual correction, but only minimally.   CONCLUSION Agreement is low between devices, except between both SD-OCT machines. Manual correction tends to improve results.