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Purpose: To investigate the diagnostic utility of microvascular parameters for grading the severity of diabetic retinopathy (DR) with a range of views using wide-field swept-source optical coherence tomography angiography (SS-OCTA). Methods: This retrospective study grouped 235 eyes with diabetes into the five grades: diabetes without retinopathy (no-DR), mild non-proliferative DR (NPDR), moderate NPDR, severe NPDR, and proliferative DR (PDR). Foveal avascular zone (FAZ) metrics, vessel density (VD), and the capillary nonperfusion area (NPA) were quantified with a customized, semiautomatic software algorithm. Regions of interest were selected from three rectangular fields of different sizes (i.e., 3 × 3 mm2, 6 × 6 mm2, and 10 × 10 mm2), perpendicular to the fovea-optic disc axis. Results: NPA obtained from the 6 × 6mm2 and 10 × 10mm2 areas was the only discriminating parameter for the three NPDR stages. ROC curve analysis revealed that NPA from the 10 × 10mm2 field exhibited the best performance for grading DR into five stages. The NPA cutoff values were 3.7% (area under the curve (AUC): 0.91), 4.7% (AUC: 0.94), 9.3% (AUC: 0.94), and 21.4% (AUC: 0.90) for grading no-DR, mild from moderate NPDR, moderate from severe NPDR, and severe NPDR from PDR, respectively. Conclusions: Increasing DR severity as assessed by conventional grading systems is accompanied with increasing retinal ischemia on SS-OCTA. NPA measured from the larger 10 × 10 mm2 scan area showed the highest sensitivity for determining five-grade DR severity. In the future, the addition of quantitative NPA may provide a more clinically feasible DR grading system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes of retinal blood vessel calibers may reflect various retinal diseases and even several non-retinal diseases. We propose a new method to estimate retinal vessel calibers from 3D optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) images based on 3D modeling using superellipsoids. Taking advantage of 3D visualization of the retinal tissue microstructures in vivo provided by OCTA, our method can detect retinal blood vessels precisely, estimate their calibers reliably, and show the relative flow speed visually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]