Discrimination between surgical and non-surgical nuclear cataract based on ROC analysis

CLEMENTE PAZ FILGUEIRA; ROBERTO SÁNCHEZ; ELISA COLOMBO; MERITXELL VILASECA; JAUME PUJOL; LUIS ISSOLIO

CURRENT EYE RESEARCH

TAYLOR & FRANCIS INC

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2014

0271-3683

Purpose: The aim of this article is to propose a quantitative methodology for determining a criterion to discriminate the nonsurgical nuclear cataract from the surgical one taking into account objective measures of intraocular scattering in patients with good visual acuity (40.6). Methods: Two groups of subjects were taken into account: a control group and a group with nuclear cataracts. At a first stage, eyes belonging to the cataract group were classified into ??nonsurgical?? and ??surgical?? cataracts by ophthalmologists at their clinical settings. At a second stage a double-pass instrument was also used to determine the objective scatter index (OSI) at the laboratory. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to analyze OSI values to determine a value able to separate between nonsurgical and surgical cataracts. Results: We obtained statistically significant differences among the control and both nuclear cataract groups(p50.05). ROC curves determined an OSI criterion level (of 2.1) to suggest surgery in nuclear cataracts with an area under curve of 0.83, i.e. with 80% of sensitivity and 80% of specificity. Conclusions: ROC analysis allows separating both groups of nuclear cataract, and we determined a value of OSI in nuclear cataract quantification for surgery.