Journal of American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus
Major articleRetCam Imaging for Retinopathy of Prematurity Screening
Section snippets
Patients
Premature infants undergoing routine ROP screening examinations at Children’s Hospital Boston and Brigham and Women’s Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs) were evaluated from August 2003 to January 2004. Screening guidelines for ROP at these two institutions included infants with gestational age (GA) less than 32 weeks, birth weight (BW) less than 1500 g, or older and heavier babies with an unstable clinical course who were believed to be at high risk for ROP by their attending
Results
ROP screening with RetCam imaging and indirect ophthalmoscopy was performed on 86 eyes of 43 infants. GA ranged from 23 to 33 weeks with a mean GA of 27.3 weeks. BW ranged from 460 to 2290 g with a mean weight of 1024 g. In this cohort, 42% of the infants developed ROP and 5% of infants required treatment.
No RetCam imaging had to be aborted secondary to patient stress. Initial images in 21% of cases could not be evaluated for ROP secondary to poor image quality (Figure 4). However, in 78% of
Discussion
With the advent of telemedicine and the decreasing number of ophthalmologists skilled in or available for examining infants for ROP, screening and management of ROP by digital imaging has been proposed. Previous studies have evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of detecting all stages of ROP and have shown that ROP in peripheral zone 2 or 3 was often missed in RetCam evaluations.6, 7, 8 Schwartz et al9 compared telemedical evaluation and management with traditional on-site evaluations of
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