Clinical significance of central corneal thickness and comparison of central corneal thickness measurements methods
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1 Muğla Sıtkı Koçman Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi Göz Hastalıkları AD., Muğla, Turkey* Corresponding Author

Abstract

Significance of central corneal thickness has been increasing in ophthalmology practice. It is an important clinical evaluation tool especially prior to refractive surgery and in diagnosis of glaucoma and keratoconus. Refractive surgery is planned according to preoperative central corneal thickness measurements. Besides, in order to determine actual intraocular pressure, central corneal thickness is measured and corrected eye pressure is obtained. Today, devices used in measurement of central corneal thickness do the measurement according to two principles. First and relatively older method is ultrasonic method. Optic method is the second and more recent method. In daily practice, the most commonly used clinical method in measurement of central corneal thickness is ultrasound pachymeter. However, this measurement technique requires contact between cornea and probe and gives thinner measurement results compared to the methods that use optic principle. Recently, several technologic methods based on optics have been put in use; they provide advantages of non-contact technique and objective determination of central corneal thickness. Of these methods, most commonly used include Specular Microscopy, Optical coherence tomography, Laser Doppler Interferometry, Optical low coherence reflectometry pachymetry, Optic based topographic mapping (also called screening section pachymetry) and Pentacam. In this article, it was aimed to evaluate importance of central corneal thickness in clinical use and compare measurement methods.

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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Article Type: Review

J Clin Exp Invest, 2014, Volume 5, Issue 1, 153-158

https://doi.org/10.5799/ahinjs.01.2014.01.0381

Publication date: 11 Mar 2014

Article Views: 2228

Article Downloads: 1939

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