At this year’s European Association of Retina Specialists (EURETINA) conference, Boris Stanzel, MD, visited the Ophthalmology Times Europe booth. Dr. Stanzel spoke on a wide range of topics, including central visual field thickness (CST) measurement in age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and diabetic macular edema (DME), choosing the right intraocular lens for patients with geographic atrophy (GA), and in-clinic applications of artificial intelligence (AI), among other exciting symposia from the conference.
Editor’s note: The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.
Dr. Boris Stanzel: Hello, my name is Boris Stanzel. I am a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Bonn, but my main practice is at the Sulzbach Eye Clinic in Germany. Our usual underdog statement is that nobody knows about Sulzbach. Sulzbach is on the southwestern border, on the border with France and Luxembourg, and is very famous for its wine. Jokes aside, we are the largest surgical retina center in Germany and one of the top three for retinal care in the country.
I made a couple of contributions at EURETINA. One that I talked about was fluid quantification with the RetInSight fluid monitor in VABYSMO (faricimab-svoa) patients in a real-world cohort. Basically, when we compared fluid quantification in AMD to CST measurements, we found that CST underestimated dryness with VABYSMO by 2x and CST underestimated dryness by 4x in DME. So if you translate that to, say, a switcher population, basically AMD patients get up to 40% more dryness when you put VABYSMO on them. DME patients get up to 60% more dryness when you put VABYSMO on them. So this is the first time we’ve quantified these data. It’s a small cohort, but it seems like it’s reproducible within a lot of incremental data acquisition that we’ve done.
Another contribution that we made at the conference was that we looked at a new intraocular lens, a monofocal lens with a hyperspherical design. This is very interesting for patients who have some kind of macular atrophy. Geographic atrophy is a big buzzword right now, so a lot of patients who have macular atrophy lose their gaze. Gaze can be quantified with micro-perimetry. In other words, when you first turn on the micro-perimetry device, you get what’s called a gaze cloud. The bigger the gaze cloud, the worse the patient’s ability to gaze. Our theory was that when you insert a regular lens, the IOL basically shines (the light path) into the macular scar, which doesn’t make sense. But with a lens that has a wider field of view, you can actually see the relatively healthy area at the edge of the scar, and thereby potentially reduce the gaze cloud. And this is exactly what happened in a smaller patient group. It was basically unrelated to approval or transparency. We also saw a reduction in the fixation point. This is probably an unexplored area in the field of visual rehabilitation for patients at this point. So I would add that we basically don’t have a control group. Therefore, although we are still in the exploratory stage at this point, if we understand how to use this lens and how it functions, there is a high possibility that it will be possible to equip patients with macular disease with it, and I think this is a very interesting technology.
What else excited me about this conference? You know, AI is everywhere. So we all have this problem: “I saw this patient then, and then I saw another patient, and I need to contact the clinic manager, can you make a list for me?” And recently I came across a presentation at the EURETINA Innovation Symposium, and the result of that presentation was, “This is a Chat GPT-like technology, you tell it what you want, and it will populate the medical records and look up the patient for you.” Amazing! I’m not saying that AI will replace humans, but this idea is very close to that.
