Retinal Thickness Irregularities in Preclinical Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the most common complication of diabetes and the leading cause of vision loss worldwide. Clinical detection relies on the manifestation of sight-threatening microvascular, macrovascular and edematous ocular insults. However, preclinical investigations detected retinal thickness irregularities. We hypothesized that retinal thickness irregularities are localized to specific retinal regions and layers. Training and validation data were collected from participants with diabetes with no/minimal DR and healthy individuals to identify and verify regions of interest. Optical coherence tomography and MATLAB速 computing were the primary tools used to measure retinal thickness in each participant. Linear mixed-effects models identified four significant regions of thickness irregularities from the training data; these were not matched by validation data. Nonetheless, retinal thickness irregularities were localized to specific regions and layers. Recognizing that there are retinal regions susceptible to retinal thickness irregularities during preclinical stages of disease is important for early disease detection.M.Sc