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Purpose: MMP9 is expressed in choroidal dendritic cells (DCs) and the MMP9 locus has been associated with neovascular AMD (nvAMD). We evaluated the potential association of systemic inflammatory markers with visual acuity, injection burden, and fluid parameters derived from AI based quantitative OCT analysis of nvAMD patients with high-risk MMP9 genotype.

Methods: An ensemble approach of U-Net architectures (convolutional neural networks) developed for retinal pathology segmentation, was trained to simultaneously segment intraretinal (IRF), subretinal fluid (SRF), and pigment epithelial detachment (PED) regions from Heidelberg OCT scans in nvAMD subjects (n= 100) receiving consecutive anti-VEGF injections (comprising 6320 OCTs obtained from 2009-2022). 10-fold cross-validation was performed with training OCT scans from 90 subjects and a validation dataset of 10 subjects. We compared …