Precision of anterior and posterior corneal curvature measurements taken with the Oculus Pentacam

In the era of rapid advances in technology, new ophthalmic instruments are constantly influencing health sciences and necessitating investigations of the accuracy and precision of the new technology. The Oculus Pentacam (70700) has been available for some time now and numerous studies have investigated the precision of some of the parameters that the Pentacam is capable of measuring. Unfortunately some of these studies fall short in confusing the meaning of accuracy and precision and in not being able to analyse the data correctly or completely. The aim of this study was to investigate the precision of the anterior and posterior corneal curvature measurements taken with the Oculus Pentacam (70700) holistically with sound multivariate statistical methods. Twenty successive Pentacam measurements were taken over three different measuring sessions on one subject. Keratometric data for both the anterior and posterior corneal surfaces were analysed using multivariate statistics to determine the precision of the Oculus Pentacam. This instrument was found to have good precision both clinically and statistically for anterior corneal measurements but only good clinical precision for the posterior corneal surface.