In several diseases, fractal analysis has been proven useful to give contribution in diagnosis and prognosis of the patient and to improve treatments. In the present work we have evaluated the mass dimension of the vascular pattern of optic nerve head in non-glaucomatous optic neuropathic patients and healthy controls. Static fluorescein angiogram was performed and the images of the early venous phase were saved. A manual outline of the trajectories of the two-dimensional vascular network was performed down to vessels of 20 um diameter, processed to threshold the vessel network without background interference and converted into an outline of single pixels and then the fractal analysis was performed-Mass dimension evaluation of the optic nerve head microvascularity was able to differentiate health condition vs. non-glaucomatous neuropathies (p<0.01), as well optic neuritis vs. nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (p<0.01), with high sensitivity and specificity (p<0.0001; p<0.0001). Mass dimension index shows a significantly increased vascular complexity of the optic nerve head in cases compared with controls, also permitting to distinguish between patients affected by optic neuritis vs. nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy. This new, fast, unexpensive, methodology may be used in helping the clinician to perform the differential diagnosis between the pathologies and to study the effect of therapies during the follow up of the patient.
Keywords: Mass dimension; Fractal analysis; Optic neuritis; Nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy; Differential diagnosis
Published on: Mar 7, 2016 Pages: 6-10
Full Text PDF
Full Text HTML
DOI: 10.17352/2455-4634.000012
CrossMark
Publons
Harvard Library HOLLIS
Search IT
Semantic Scholar
Get Citation
Base Search
Scilit
OAI-PMH
ResearchGate
Academic Microsoft
GrowKudos
Universite de Paris
UW Libraries
SJSU King Library
SJSU King Library
NUS Library
McGill
DET KGL BIBLiOTEK
JCU Discovery
Universidad De Lima
WorldCat
VU on WorldCat
PTZ: We're glad you're here. Please click "create a new query" if you are a new visitor to our website and need further information from us.
If you are already a member of our network and need to keep track of any developments regarding a question you have already submitted, click "take me to my Query."