Fig. 1

Steps of thematic evidence synthesis for intraoperative imaging devices. Step 1: Identification through systematic article search. This step was conducted using the PRISMA 2020 Flow Diagram to enable comprehensive exploration. The parameters shown in this figure (‘X’ and ‘Y’) define the target clinical application and intraoperative imaging modalities, respectively. In this study, we set ‘X’ to ‘Retinal’ and ‘Y’ to ‘iOCT’. Step 2: Familiarisation and initial coding. In this step, reviewers familiarised themselves with the included studies and imported the papers into QDA software. Line-by-line coding was performed, allowing each sentence to be indexed to a specific code. Step 3: Development of themes. This step involved a looping process. Initially, reviewers developed provisional themes to identify comprehensive themes and sub-themes. Subsequently, the reviewers examined the relationship between the developed codes and the provisional themes. If the provisional thematic framework was a coherent synthesis that facilitated discussion and analysis, the step was finalised; otherwise, Step 3 was repeated