Quantiftcat Analysis Of The Morphology Changes Of The Premature Infants’ Retinal Vessels

Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a disease seen in the retina of prematurity and isone of the major diseases that can cause visual loss. Plus disease is severe dilation andtortuosity of the posterior pole vessels, and it is an importmant sign of severe ROP. Thisstudy is to use a software we developed to measure the vessel width and vessel tortuosity.We hope to find the morphology changes of the posterior pole retinal vessels in the processof ROP.120retinal images from60premature infants from neonatal ward of The First Hospitalof Jilin University were enrolled which had been done ROP screening with Retcam Ⅱby thesame ophthalmologist. These images were then divided into two groups, one is Prethresholddisease and Threshold disease ROP group (60images from30infants), the other is normalgroup without ROP (60images from30infants). All the images selected were posterior poleretinal images with optic nerve in the center, with the help of Image J software, a circle areawith the optic nerve in the center and with a radius equal to the distance between the centerof the optic nerve and the macula were selected, at the same time,the circle were separatedinto four quadrants by two vertical lines, temporalis superior, temporalis inferior, nasalinferior and nasal superior. With the help of operator’s operation as well as the software’sfunction of automatical measurement and calculation, the most tortuous vessel’s tortuosity canbe calculated. The computer software has some special functions such as find vessel edgesand sharp the edges, it can magnify the selected vessel into any size. We used these functionsto measure the most dilated vessel’s width in each quadrant and select the vessel located1disc diameter from the center of optic nerve. The results can be showed automatically andsaved as Excel. After the measurement was completed, the datas were gathered for statisticalanalysis. Compared and analyzed the vessel width and vessel tortuosity in each quadrantbetween groups, and analyzed the morphology changes of the retinal vessels betweenquadrants in ROP group.We can see:1.In these two groups, the vessel width and vessel tortuosity in ROP grouphad significant difference compared with normal group(P＜0.001), especially in thetemporalis superior quadrant.2.In ROP group, the vessel width had no significant differencebetween temporalis superior quadrant and temporalis inferior quadrant(P＞0.05), but had significant difference in other quadrants compared with each other(P＜0.05).3. In ROPgroup, the vessel totuosity had no significant difference in each quadrant compared witheach other(P＞0.05).This study come to conclusions as follows:1.Compared to the normal group, thePrethreshold disease and Threshold disease ROP group had obvious dilation and tortuosityof the posterior pole retinal vessels in each quadrant.2.ROP can especially influence thevessel width of the posterior pole retinal in temporalis quadrant. The influence that ROPmade to the vessel tortuosity of the posterior pole retinal had no significant difference ineach quadrant.3.Quantificat analysis of the morphology changes of the posterior pole retinalvessels seen in the images of premature infants could objectively reflect that whether there isplus disease or not in ROP examination, and whether the plus disease in ROP is serious ornot.