Validation of Interleukins and Other Cytokines Together With OCT Imaging for Rapid Infectious Keratitis Assessment

Infectious or inflammatory processes of the cornea (keratitis) are common and vision threatening. They are the 5th leading cause of blindness and especially infectious keratitis is responsible for 2,000,000 new blind eyes per year (worldwide). Commonly, the presence and nature of bacterial pathogens is determined by taking scratches from the cornea, subsequent Gram stain and examination of microbiological cultures. Major problems in therapeutic decision-making pose the long duration of bacterial culturing for pathogen detection (approximately one week), relatively low sensitivity and increasingly frequent bacterial resistances to antibiotic agents.

In small previous studies optical coherence tomography (OCT) combined with analysis of tear cytokines were found to be supportive in distinguishing between different pathogens causing keratitis. These studies appear to be a game changer in the field of rapid testing for keratitis. However, the problem of these studies is a small sample size and the use of partially outdated equipment.

Benefit/risk assessment Although there is no direct benefit for participating subjects, the results of the study can help to gain more insight into the course of keratitis and could further improve the diagnostic utilities in disease management.

There is no additional medication used in this study. The findings of the present study could help to establish a better understanding of keratitis and could enable faster and target-oriented therapy. All applied measurement techniques are painfree.

Thus, the risk to benefit ratio seems to be acceptable.