About the Authors

Yanling Ouyang

Contributed equally to this work with: Yanling Ouyang, Uwe Pleyer

Affiliation Charité, University Medicine Berlin, Department of Ophthalmology, Berlin, Germany

Uwe Pleyer

Contributed equally to this work with: Yanling Ouyang, Uwe Pleyer

Affiliation Charité, University Medicine Berlin, Department of Ophthalmology, Berlin, Germany

Qing Shao

Affiliation Charité, University Medicine Berlin, Department of Ophthalmology, Berlin, Germany

Pearse A. Keane

Affiliation NIHR Biomedical Research Centre for Ophthalmology, Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, London, United Kingdom

Nicole Stübiger

Affiliation Charité, University Medicine Berlin, Department of Ophthalmology, Berlin, Germany

Antonia M. Joussen

Affiliation Charité, University Medicine Berlin, Department of Ophthalmology, Berlin, Germany

Srinivas R. Sadda

Affiliation Doheny Eye Institute and Department of Ophthalmology, Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States of America

Florian M. Heussen

florian.heussen@gmail.com

Affiliation Charité, University Medicine Berlin, Department of Ophthalmology, Berlin, Germany

Competing Interests

Dr. Keane has received a proportion of his funding from the Department of Health's NIHR Biomedical Research Centre for Ophthalmology at Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology. Drs. Keane and Heussen have received travel grants from the Allergan European Retina Panel. Dr. Joussen received financial compensation for lectures from Novartis, Allergan Inc. and Bayer AG. Dr. Pleyer has been the Principal Investigator/Consultant for Abbott, Alcon, Allergan, Amgen, Bausch and Lomb, Bayer/Schering, Centocor, Esba Tech, Novartis but has no commercial interests or financial relationships to any agent, device, or technique. Dr. Sadda is a co-inventor of Doheny intellectual property related to optical coherence tomography that has been licensed by Topcon Medical Systems. Dr Sadda is a member of the scientific advisory board for Heidelberg Engineering. Dr Sadda also receives research support from Carl Zeiss Meditec, Optos, and Optovue, Inc. Please note, although Dr. Sadda is a co-inventor of Doheny intellectual property related to optical coherence tomography (OCT) that has been licensed by Topcon Medical Systems, the authors have used a Spectralis OCT system (Spectralis, Heidelberg Engineering, Germany) in this study. Thus, there is no patent relating to material pertinent to this article. There are no further patents, products in development or marketed products to declare. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLoS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: YO FMH UP. Performed the experiments: YO QS NS PAK SRS AMJ. Analyzed the data: YO QS FMH. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: SRS. Wrote the paper: YO FMH PAK.