Research Article Reproducibility of Neonate Ocular Circulation Measurements Using Laser Speckle Flowgraphy

Copyright © 2015 Tadashi Matsumoto et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Measuring the ocular bloodflow inneonatesmay clarify the relationships between eye diseases and ocular circulation abnormalities. However, no method for noninvasively measuring ocular circulation in neonates is established. We used laser speckle flowgraphy (LSFG) modified for neonates to measure their ocular circulation and investigated whether this method is reproducible. During their normal sleep, we studied 16 subjects (adjusted age of 34–48 weeks) whose blood flow could be measured three consecutive times. While the subjects slept in the supine position, three mean blur rate (MBR) values of the optic nerve head (ONH) were obtained: the MBR-A (mean of all values), MBR-V (vessel mean), and MBR-T (tissue mean), and nine blood flow pulse waveform parameters in the ONH were examined. We analyzed the coefficient of variation (COV) and the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) for each parameter.The COVs of theMBR values were all ≤10%.The ICCs of theMBR values were all>0.8. Good COVs were observed for the blowout score, blowout time, rising rate, falling rate, and acceleration time index. Although the measurement of ocular circulation in the neonates was difficult, our results exhibited reproducibility, suggesting that this method could be used in clinical research. 1