title: Assessment of Corneal Epithelial Thickness in Asymmetric Keratoconic Eyes and Normal Eyes Using Fourier Domain Optical Coherence Tomography.
abstract: Purpose. To compare the characteristics of asymmetric keratoconic eyes and normal eyes by Fourier domain optical coherence tomography (OCT) corneal mapping. Methods. Retrospective corneal and epithelial thickness OCT data for 74 patients were compared in three groups of eyes: keratoconic (n = 22) and normal fellow eyes (n = 22) in patients with asymmetric keratoconus and normal eyes (n = 104) in healthy subjects. Areas under the curve (AUC) of receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curves for each variable were compared across groups to indicate their discrimination capacity. Results. Three variables were found to differ significantly between fellow eyes and normal eyes (all p < 0.05): minimum corneal thickness, thinnest corneal point, and central corneal thickness. These variables combined showed a high discrimination power to differentiate fellow eyes from normal eyes indicated by an AUC of 0.840 (95% CI: 0.762-0.918). Conclusions. Our findings indicate that topographically normal fellow eyes in patients with very asymmetric keratoconus differ from the eyes of healthy individuals in terms of their corneal epithelial and pachymetry maps. This type of information could be useful for an early diagnosis of keratoconus in topographically normal eyes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ophthalmology, University Hospital of Vigo, 36200 Vigo, Spain.
authors.forename: S
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-7302-827X
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Catalan
authors.affiliation: Clínica Cadarso, 36203 Vigo, Spain.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Cadarso
authors.affiliation: Department of Ophthalmology, Hospital da Boa Nova, 4455-421 Matosinhos, Portugal.
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Esteves
authors.affiliation: Clínica Salgado-Borges, 4000-422 Porto, Portugal.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Salgado-Borges
authors.affiliation: Department of Statistics and Operations Research, School of Medicine, University of Santiago de Compostela, 15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lopez
authors.affiliation: Department of Statistics and Operations Research, School of Medicine, University of Santiago de Compostela, 15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Cadarso