Retinal detachment

Abstract

Although optical coherence tomography (OCT) was first introduced to investigate and characterize primarily macular diseases, clinical studies rapidly started to address the use of OCT in the diagnosis and management of retinal detachment. Before that time, the pre- and postoperative evaluation of the detached retina were entirely clinical, but even so, this yielded some useful data as early as 1937, when Algernon Reese hypothesized for the first time that poor postoperative visual acuity after retinal detachment repair may be related to the presence of a cystic macular degeneration as observed preoperatively in the detached macula (Reese 1937). What Reese could observe by ophthalmoscopy almost 80 years ago was eventually confirmed using OCT by looking at retinal detachments both pre- and postoperatively (Hagimura et al. 2002; Wolfensberger and Gonvers 2002). This chapter summarizes the current literature on the role of OCT in the diagnosis and the management of retinal detachment.