Clinical advances in hyper-reflective bands of outer retina in spectral-domain OCT image

With the widespread use of high-resolution spectral-domain OCT (SD-OCT) in clinical practice, one of the greatest progresses to the ophthalmologists is more detailed image analyses of outer retina in the macular region.There are four clear hyper-reflective bands of outer retina in the SD-OCT images, instead of three bands in the time-domain OCT (TD-OCT), the bands from inner to external are external limiting membrane (ELM), inner segment/outer segment (IS/OS) junction, cone outer segment tips (COST), and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), respectively.From a perspective of corresponding retinal histological structure, all of the three bands of ELM, (IS/OS) and COST are within the photoreceptor cells.Therefore, the integrity of the three bands correlates well with the status and function of photoreceptor cells.It is one of the hot topics to study the status and function, as well as injury and repair of the photoreceptor cells using SD-OCT.This article reviewed the relevant clinical studies about the three bands of ELM, IS/OS and COST, including macular hole (MH), idiopathic epiretinal membrane (IERM), rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (RRD) and age-related macular degeneration (AMD).