Automated detection of the foveal center improves SD-OCT measurements of central retinal thickness.

To investigate the performance of an automated foveal center detection algorithm on spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT). Fifty normal eyes and 50 eyes with early stage dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) were analyzed. The actual scan center (SC), automatically detected foveal center (AF), and manually identified foveal center (MF) were compared. The mean of the radial distances was 89 ± 120 μm from MF to SC and 54 ± 41 μm from MF to AF for normal eyes and 179 ± 125 μm from SC to MF and 104 ± 62 μm from AF to MF for eyes with AMD. The differences were statistically significant (P < .001). The automated algorithm designed to detect the foveal center was more accurate in detecting the foveal center than relying on the fixation target of the SD-OCT instrument.