Morphologic Stages of Full-Thickness Macular Hole on Spectral-Domain OCT
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To describe the sequential morphological changes of the outer retina after full-thickness macular hole (FTMH) formation utilizing a novel, objective staging system based on OCT, and to determine its association with baseline visual acuity, duration of symptoms, and postoperative visual acuity at 3 months. DESIGN: Retrospective, observational, multicenter study. PARTICIPANTS: Patients with idiopathic FTMH presenting to St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto, Canada, and Retina Consultants of Texas, Houston, Texas from 2009 to 2022. METHODS: The medical charts of 1000 patients with FTMH were reviewed, and those with ≥2 preoperative spectral-domain OCTs (SD-OCTs) were analyzed. A staging system was developed by assessing outer retinal morphology on successive SD-OCT central foveal scans. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Sequential outer retinal morphological changes with SD-OCT over time and their association with baseline visual acuity, duration of symptoms, and postoperative functional outcomes. RESULTS: Fifty-two eyes of 52 patients with a mean age of 65.4 ± 8.4 years were included. Sequential outer retinal morphologic changes at the FTMH borders occurred in 4 distinct and reproducible stages: stage A, separation of the neurosensory retina from the retinal pigment epithelium with the well-defined external limiting membrane (ELM), ellipsoid zone (EZ), and interdigitation zone (4/52, 7.7%); stage B, thickening of the EZ (27/52, 52.0%); stage C, patchy (moth-eaten) photoreceptor loss (16/52, 30.7%); and stage D, severe or complete loss of inner and outer segments and bare ELM (5/52, 9.6%). When assessing the preoperative OCT scans closest to the time of surgery, over a mean follow-up period of 288.9 ± 350.4 days (range, 5-1841), 28.85% (15/52) of eyes were in stage B, 28.85% (15/52) were in stage C, and 42.3% (22/52) were in stage D. There was a statistically significant association between increasing stage at baseline and longer duration of macular hole symptoms (P = 0.032) and worse visual acuity at baseline (P < 0.001). Additionally, patients presenting with stages B and C at the time point closest to surgery had better visual acuity outcomes 3 months postoperatively than those with stage D (P = 0.04). CONCLUSIONS: This SD-OCT staging system describes the sequential in vivo morphologic changes after FTMH formation, providing a novel imaging biomarker. FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE(S): Proprietary or commercial disclosure may be found in the Footnotes and Disclosures at the end of this article.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".