OCT Artifacts in Glaucoma

Abstract

Various imaging modalities are used in conjunction with visual fields and clinical examination of glaucoma patients. OCT like other imaging modalities typically compare patient images to a normative database and present structure characteristics that are outside of normal for age-matched controls in red lettering or boxes, whereas structure characteristics within the normal range are presented in green. Although optical coherence tomography (OCT) is currently an important adjunct to clinical diagnosis, normative databases do not contain examples of atypical optic nerve head or retinal nerve fiber layer morphologies and can therefore flag these findings as abnormal. Furthermore, imaging can provide artifacts which do not represent true ocular disease but are secondary to limitations of imaging technology. Recognition of false-positive “Red Disease” and false-negative “Green Disease” is of importance in diagnosing and treating glaucoma. In this section we provide examples for ‘Red disease’ and ‘Green Disease’ and the artifacts that may affect diagnostic performance of the spectral domain OCT.