ESCRS poster awards highlight benefits of innovation

The ability to think outside the box and apply new approaches to improving diagnostic and therapeutic applications of existing technologies were rewarded by the judging panel in the Best Poster Awards at the ESCRS Winter Meeting Virtual 2021. Rifat Rasier MD, PhD, from Turkey won first prize in the Cataract category for his poster entitled “Ablation of monofocal intraocular lenses with femtosecond laser”, while the best Refractive award went to Divya Trivedi MD from India for her poster “Novel collagen imaging using ultra-high resolution polarisation sensitive optical coherence tomography (OCT) in healthy, suspect and keratoconus corneas”. Dr Rasier’s study highlighted the ability of the femtosecond laser to transform a monofocal IOL to multifocal form by generating a series of ablation patterns on the surface of the lens. The laser was used to process slide samples by generating a Fresnel zone plate (FZP) on the slide and then on the IOL. FZP is used to focus light using the diffraction of light and consists of concentric successive opaque and transmissive rings. The FZP will behave like a lens with a certain focal length depending on the ring radius and the wavelength of the incident light. In the study, Dr Rasier showed that it is possible to replicate the same FZP pattern on the IOL as the plate using a modified laser power setting. Similar focusing results were obtained with both the multifocal IOL created by FS laser and a commercially available multifocal IOL. The study authors concluded that the FZP effectively acts as a lens to focus the incoming light in a laboratory setting and that future studies could aim to show that “by imitating the situation inside the eye, patients who have previously had a monofocal IOL can be transformed to multifocal IOL inside the eye.” https://escrs.conference2web.com/wintermeeting2021/#!resources/ablation-of-monofocal-intraocular-lenses-with-femtosecond-laser In Dr Trivedi’s study, the benefits of using polarisation sensitive optical coherence tomography (PSOCT) to detect suspect keratoconus corneas was demonstrated. The starting point was to pose the question of whether there was an effective way to image the spatial layout of collagen fibres and their orientation in the eye. The authors recruited 50 normal eyes, 35 suspect keratoconus eyes and 50 confirmed keratoconus eyes and showed the utility of using a custom-built PSOCT device for in vivo imaging of collagen. Although corneal tomography is the current gold standard for diagnosis of keratoconus, the disease pathology is located in the corneal stroma which is not directly imaged by topographers. PSOCT was shown to be clearly able to identify differences in collagen fibril distribution between healthy and kerataconus corneas. Other potential applications of the technology may lie in post-graft imaging, diagnosis of retinal disorders, screening for refractive surgery or for assessing cross-linking outcomes or keratoconus progression. https://escrs.conference2web.com/wintermeeting2021/#!resources/novel-collagen-imaging-using-ultra-high-resolution-polarisation-sensitive-optical-coherence-tomography-in-healthy-suspect-and-keratoconus-corneas

Tags: escrs poster awards, ESCRS Winter Virtual 2021