Purpose - Eye diseases affecting central vision impair fixation and interfere with day-to-day tasks such as reading. Diabetic retinopathy and clinically significant macular edema (CSME) are leading causes of visual impairment in diabetes patients. The aim of this study is to find whether diabetic patients with CSME have poorer fixation stability compared to patients without CSME, by analyzing the fundus images obtained from the Laser Scanning Digital Camera (LSDC).

Methods - Two hundred underserved, diabetic patients were screened for diabetic retinopathy at the Eastmont Wellness Center within the EyePACS telemedicine network, using LSDC. One eye of each patient who had diabetic retinopathy was included in this study. Non-mydriatic color fundus photos were classified for presence of CSME by two independent, certified EyePACS graders. The first 50 patients (25 males & 25 females) with CSME were selected and 50 (27 males & 23 females) diabetic patients without CSME were selected as controls. Mean age was 59 (±9) years for patients with CSME and was 55 (±10) years for patients without CSME. The subjects included 53% Hispanics, 26% African Americans and 21% other. A series of 20 images (36 deg field, 1024 X 1024 pixels, and 850 nm) were acquired at 11 fps. Eye positions were obtained by selecting a region of interest in the first image of each series and aligning the remaining images to that region by cross-correlation. The bi-contour ellipse area (BCEA) and the standard deviation of the Euclidean distance (SDED) were used to quantify fixation stability.

Results - The fixation stability for patients with CSME was significantly worse than for those without CSME (t test: p < 0.001, 0.007 for BCEA and SDED, respectively). The mean fixation stability obtained by the BCEA metric was 2.74 (±0.40) log(minArc2) and 2.34 (±0.42) log(minArc2) for patients with and without CSME, respectively. For SDED the mean was 48.4 (±28.8) microns and 34.6 (±20.4) microns for patients with and without CSME, respectively. The correlation with age was not significant for either group (R2 = 0.052, 0.011).

Conclusions - Diabetic patients with CSME had poorer fixation stability than patients without CSME for both metrics. Fixation stability is a potential tool for assessing macular function and could be used for tracking the treatment and progression of macular edema.The LSDC images provide one method to quantify fixation stability rapidly.