Optical coherence tomography of the optic nerve head: interindividual reproducibility.

Purpose: Optical coherence tomography may be a new technique for quantitative 3-dimensional assessment of the optic nerve head for diagnosis of optic nerve anomalies and diseases such as the glaucomas. The purpose of the present study was to examine its reproducibility.

Patients And Methods: The clinical noninterventional study included 10 randomly chosen eyes of 10 healthy individuals who underwent 24 optical coherence tomographic examinations with the high-resolution and fast scan program, interactively corrected or uncorrected. The pupils were not dilated. All examinations were performed by 3 examiners independently of one another. The coefficient of variation was calculated as the ratio of the mean of the standard deviations divided by the mean of the means.

Results: The coefficients of variation for redetermination of optic disc area, ranging between 0.047 and 0.119, were lowest for the manually corrected fast scan mode and highest for the uncorrected fast scan mode. For remeasurements of the neuroretinal rim area, the best mean coefficient of variation was 0.073+/-0.026 (corrected fast scan mode).

Conclusions: In healthy eyes, the morphometric measurements of the optic nerve head by optical coherence tomography show a relatively high reproducibility with mean coefficients of variation lower than 10% for remeasurements of the optic disc and neuroretinal rim area. With undilated pupils, reproducibility is better with the fast scan mode with interactive correction of the outlining of the optic disc border than it is with the high-resolution mode.