November is National Diabetes Month. It’s a time to reflect on the growing incidence of diabetes in North America, Europe, and the rest of the world. If you’re committed to superior diagnosis and care, here are two reasons why your ever-increasing number of diabetic patients need ultra-widefield imaging.

The starting point is a stark set of numbers. Globally there are an estimated 415 million people with diabetes, a number expected to grow to 642 million by 2040. In North America and Europe, similar stories: a total of 104 patients million today, increasing more than 26% to 132 million by 2040. Up to 40% of affected individuals will develop some level of diabetic retinopathy (DR). A significant percentage will develop diabetic macular edema (DME). All of these people will need visual health screening and supervision for the rest of their lives.

Reasons to Use Ultra-widefield For Your Diabetic Patients

Reason #1: Ultra-widefield (UWF™) imaging technology provides you with a more complete diagnostic picture.

The gold standard for assessing the presence and severity of DR and DME is ETDRS seven standard field imagery (7SF). How does UWF imaging compare? The most significant difference is diagnostic reach. UWF imaging presents …

The diagnosis and treatment of diabetic retinopathy (DR) and diabetic macular edema (DME) are in a period of rapid evolution. While existing DR and DME treatment standards remain important points of reference, the future directions for these standards are coming into focus. The combination of new imaging tools – specifically ultra-widefield (UWF™) imaging – and more individualized treatment plans may result in earlier diagnoses, better patient management plans, and improved treatment outcomes.

Bringing Diagnosis into the 21^st Century

Perhaps the biggest change in DR diagnosis and management is the growing use of ultra-widefield imaging.

UWF imaging has been proven in studies to be clinically equivalent to conventional ETDRS seven field color imaging (7SF) in the grading of DR for central pole disease. More recent studies have shown that UWF may be superior to ETDRS in that it captures a much wider (200 degrees), view of the retina. This provides diagnostic information about the peripheral retina that is impossible to visualize using conventional imaging. Starting with color (red and green) optomap^® imaging, Optos has systematically extended its UWF-based technology into a multi-modal platform that supports fundus autofluorescence(optomap af), fluorescein angiography(optomap fa) and indocyanine green angiography (optomap icg).

Numerous studies have affirmed how …

World Sight Day is an annual day of awareness held on the second Thursday of October, to focus global attention on blindness and vision impairment. World Sight Day 2016 takes place October 13. This year’s theme and call to action is “Stronger Together,” encouraging a focus on all stakeholders who are important for successful delivery of eyecare – Optos being one of those stakeholders.

Optos plc has the vision to be The Retina Company and is recognized as a leading provider of devices to eyecare professionals for improved patient care. Optos was founded and incorporated in 1992 by Douglas Anderson after his then five-year-old son went blind in one eye because a retinal detachment was detected too late. Although his son was having routine eye exams, the exams were uncomfortable, and difficult for a child to sit still through, which made it impossible for his eye doctor to conduct a complete exam and view the entire retina. Anderson’s mission was to commercialize a patient-friendly, easy to use and comfortable retinal imaging product that encompassed a digital widefield image of the retina in a single capture. Fast forward to 1999: the P200 received both 510k clearance from the FDA and the EU CE marking. Optos devices have been sold worldwide since …

In a world where the calendar is jammed with awareness months, should home eye safety and injury prevention really demand our attention? The answer is crystal clear. With two million eye injuries taking place each year in the United States¹, eye safety is something in which everyone has a stake. Let’s look at the numbers:

— The U.S. Eye Injury Registry estimates that each year Americans suffer over two million eye injuries.

— The American Academy of Ophthalmology² and the American Society of Ocular Trauma report that close to 45% of these injuries take place at home.

— Over 40% of eye injuries were caused by work related to home repairs, yard work, cleaning and cooking. Another 40% occurred during sports or recreation.

— Over one-third of injuries took place in the living areas in the home – places like the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and family room.

— There are 125,000 eye accidents a year involving household chemicals³. This totals over 10% of the total at-home eye injuries.

What’s even more sobering? It’s estimated that 90% of eye injuries can be prevented.

Building Public Awareness about Eye Injury at Home

Statistics like these explain why …

In case studies, peer-reviewed papers, and a growing body of real-world practice, the ocular health community is improving patient management with the wider use of ultra-widefield (UWF™) imaging. Like all diagnostic breakthroughs, adoption of UWF imaging has been a long term process, paced by the accumulation of validated clinical experience. But now, more than a decade after UWF imaging was first introduced, the evidence is overwhelming that UWF imaging may have the potential to improve the diagnosis and management of a significant group of ocular diseases and conditions.

UWF imaging technology captures a 200-degree image of the retina – which enables ocular health practitioners to capture peripheral retinal images that can not be captured with conventional imaging methods. Starting with color (red and green) optomap imaging, Optos has systematically extended its UWF-based technology into a multi-modal platform that supports fundus autofluorescence (optomap af), fluorescein angiography (optomap fa) and indocyanine green angiography (optomap icg).

Where does UWF imaging have potential to improve diagnosis and treatment?

Proliferative Sickle Cell Retinopathy (PSR)

In a first of its kind case study¹, researchers used multi-mode UWF imaging to examine the vascular changes associated with PSR, a complication of sickle cell disease that impacts the retinal …

Recent research suggests that patients suffering from various systemic disorders may have their disease state impacted by the addition of ultra-widefield (UWF™) retinal imaging to their examination.  New research has found that patients with sickle cell disease may benefit from UWF retinal imaging for the diagnosis and management of sickle cell retinopathy (SCR).

Background

Sickle cell disease is an inherited disorder in which the body produces blood cells with abnormally formed hemoglobin. Symptoms include anemia, severe and chronic pain, infection, hypertension, hand and foot swelling, leg ulcers, and retinal vascular changes¹. Sickle cell disease can also have an impact on vision. Sickle cell retinopathy mainly affects the peripheral retinal vasculature² as the result of abnormal, sickle-shaped blood cells becoming trapped in the small blood vessels of the eye³. Non-proliferative SCR, characterized by retinal hemorrhage from superficial blood vessels, can cause loss of visual acuity. Proliferative SCR is marked by vascular occlusions that lead to localized ischemia, neovascularization, and in later stages blindness from vitreous hemorrhage or tractional retinal detachment. Patients with sickle cell disease are at varying degrees of risk of developing SCR, but those with the type SC or S-Thal hemoglobin genotypes are at significant risk for developing …

Over the past decade Optos has expanded the capability of its core ultra-widefield fundus imaging technology, and with that has come a widening number of clinical applications.

Ultra-widefield (UWF™) imaging technology – enabling the capture of a 200-degree view of the retina without dilation – gives ocular health practitioners imagery and diagnostic information that can’t be provided by conventional imaging methods. Starting with color (red and green) optomap imaging, Optos has systematically extended its UWF-based technology into a multi-modal platform that supports fundus autofluorescence (optomap af), fluorescein angiography (optomap fa) and indocyanine green angiography (optomap icg).

Optos has also been incorporating the latest developments in image processing, providing users with important diagnostic and treatment management tools. In its latest software release, Optos has incorporated an advanced, proven stereographic projection algorithm that corrects for peripheral image variations that occur when a spherical image is flattened.

Clinical Applications

While the most common use of UWF technology may be in the diagnosis and treatment of diabetic retinopathy (DR), optomap imaging is also being used for characterizing pediatric retinal disease; age-related macular degeneration (AMD); retinal breaks and tears; uveitis, ocular oncology; central serous chorioretinopathy (CSCR); retinal vein occlusion (RVO); and a growing list of other …

Why did Prevent Blindness, a national organization dedicated to advocacy for healthy vision, choose August as Children’s Eye Health and Safety Month? The three-word answer — back to school. Common eye conditions such as astigmatism, hyperopia (farsightedness), and myopia (nearsightedness), can compromise a child’s ability to read, comprehend classroom materials, and participate in games and sports. Over time, this can result in poor performance in school and social difficulties. What are the numbers? Studies report that nine percent of children ages 5 to 17 are affected by myopia; 13 percent are affected with hyperopia; and more than 15 percent with astigmatism. With statistics like these, August is an ideal time to schedule annual eye exams as part of every back-to-school checklist.

But annual eye exams aren’t just for the back-to-school crowd. Children under the age of six can also have vision difficulties. This is of particular concern, as undiagnosed vision difficulties in younger children can lead to developmental delays, affecting visual-motor and even cognitive functions. Along with the astigmatism, myopia and hyperopia, children 6 and under are also at risk for amblyopia, or “lazy eye.” Affecting 2 percent of children aged 6 to 72 months, if untreated, amblyopia can lead to permanent …

As medical communities around the globe work to make the transition from treating sickness to preventing it, it’s still not the norm for healthy, asymptotic individuals to receive routine screening exams.

Ocular health is no exception. How often do adults with 20/20 vision and no eye-related symptoms schedule themselves for an optometric exam? That’s especially of concern considering that a number of ocular diseases such as, diabetic retinopathy (DR)¹, open angle glaucoma², age-related macular degeneration (AMD)³, and degenerative retinoschisis⁴, may not present any symptoms during their initial phases. Early detection of these diseases can have a significant impact on courses of treatment and the probability of positive outcomes.

One illustration of how UWF™ (ultra-widefield) imaging can improve the early detection of eye disease are the results of what amounts to an inadvertent experiment in the screening of healthy individuals. Training for Optos users and new Optos technical employees involves hands-on familiarization and instruction on UWF imaging systems. Part of that involves trainees taking color optomap images of themselves.  These training exercises sometimes yield unexpected results:

— Chad, who joined Optos in 2013, is a single parent and at the time of his hire had no history of eye problems. Prior to coming to Optos his full schedule and absence …

The widening use of ultra-widefield (UWF^™) retinal imaging by ocular health practitioners is prompting researchers to address what appears to be a straightforward question: What’s normal? That is, now that UWF imaging is providing a more complete visualization of the peripheral retina, what is the physical extent of healthy retinal vasculature?

It’s not an academic question. On one level, baseline information about the extent and appearance of healthy retinal vasculature is an essential part of clinical practice. But more important, as practitioners use UWF to measure the extent of retinal pathology – for example, in estimating areas of ischemia in patients with diabetic retinopathy (DR) or retinal vein occlusion (RVO) – it’s critical to measure the portion of the retina that is affected. These estimates need to start with accepted measurements for normal, healthy retinal vasculature, one derived from statistically significant population studies and adjusted for any variations in age, sex, or other characteristics.

New research is giving first indications of the extent of healthy retinal vasculature as well as important population variations. This work is being enabled by recent advances in UWF image processing which allow optomap^® fa (fluorescein angiography) images to be corrected for peripheral distortion. These new processing algorithms – a part of Optos ProView^™ imaging software – create …