Feasibility Study of Subfoveal Choroidal Thickness Changes in Spectral-Domain Optical Coherence Tomography Measurements of Macular Telangiectasia Type 2

Macular Telangiectasia Type 2 (MacTel2) is a disease of the retina leading to a gradual deterioration of central vision. At the onset of the disease a good visual acuity is present, which declines as the disease progresses to cause reading difficulties. In this paper, we present new insights on the vascular changes in MacTel2. We investigated whether MacTel2 progression correlates to changes in the thickness of the choroid. For this purpose, we apply a recently published registration-based approach to detect deviations in the choroid on a dataset of 45 MacTel2 patients. Between 2012 and 2016 these subjects and a control group were measured twice within variable intervals of time in the Moorfields Eye Hospital in the MacTel Natural History Observation and Registry Study. Our results show that in the MacTel2 group the thickness of the choroid increased while in the control group a decrease was noted. Manual expert segmentation and an automated state-of-the-art method were used to validate the results.