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Background: Retinal haemorrhages are an important finding in children with abusive and accidental head trauma. There are no standardised and validated protocols to describe them in a consistent manner. The aim of this web-based study was to establish the reliability and validity of a new retinal haemorrhage description tool., Materials and Method: Our tool is a comprehensive questionnaire, which is applied using a retinal schematic that divides the retina into four independent zones. Four independent observers scored retinal haemorrhages from 80 retinal photographs. Inter- and intra-rater agreement (by repeat assessment of 10 photographs for each examiner) were calculated using Fleiss κ statistics., Results: A high inter-rater agreement was noted for haemorrhages in the peripapillary zones, whereas agreement was only fair for all other zones. Intra-rater agreement was high only for the posterior pole. Photographs may be an unreliable way of documenting retinal haemorrhages particularly from the peripheral retina, thus underscoring the importance of a thorough clinical examination., Conclusion: This study shows that the tool achieves some validity for describing haemorrhages in the posterior retina. It performs less well in the peripheral zones.

Background: There is currently no universally accepted classification of childhood retinal haemorrhages., Aim: To measure the inter- and intra-observer agreement of clinical classifications of retinal haemorrhages in children., Methods: Four examiners (two consultant ophthalmologists and two other clinicians) were shown 142 retinal haemorrhages on 31 RetCam photographs. The retinal haemorrhages were from children with accidental or abusive head injury, or other encephalopathies, and included retinal haemorrhages of different ages. Specified haemorrhages were initially classified by each examiner according to their clinical understanding. Altogether, 26 haemorrhages were re-presented to test intra-observer consistency. Examiners then agreed a common description for each haemorrhage type and five categories were described (vitreous, pre-retinal, nerve fibre layer, intra-retinal/sub-retinal or indeterminate) and the study repeated., Results: There was 'fair agreement' initially (Fleiss' unweighted κ=0.219) and, with the agreed classification, slight improvement (0.356). Intra-observer agreement marginally improved on re-test. The two consultant ophthalmologists showed 'fair' agreement on both occasions (paired κ statistic). The other rater pair improved from 'fair' to 'substantial' agreement with the new classification., Conclusions: The classification of retinal haemorrhage in children by appearance alone shows only fair agreement between examiners. Clinicians who are not consultant ophthalmologists appear to benefit from the new succinct classification.

Background/aims: To develop and assess a zonal classification of the retina to facilitate description of the location of retinal haemorrhages in children., Methods: A novel zonal classification of the retina was devised based on the anatomical landmarks of the optic disc and vascular arcades, by reviewing a large number of wide field digital retinal images drawn from our database of children with accidental and non-accidental head injury and other encepthalopathies. Four expert examiners then independently 'located' 142 retinal haemorrhages by zone, from 31 high quality photographs., Results: Cohen's unweighted kappa scores for all possible pairs of the four raters (ie, six pairs) ranged from 0.86 to 0.92, that is 'almost perfect' agreement. Fleiss' kappa for agreement between multiple raters (four) and for multiple categories (three) was 0.8841, that is 'almost perfect' agreement. Cohen's unweighted kappa statistic for intrarater reliability gave an overall concordance that ranged from 'substantial' to 'perfect' agreement., Conclusion: This new retinal zone classification and the use of photographs and templates is a very reliable tool for reporting the location of retinal haemorrhages from multiple aetiologies in children, and may be useful for research and medico-legal reports.