Ophthalmology Science

IntroductionAnti-vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) therapies are standards of care for vision-threatening retinal diseases. This retrospective observational study describes demographics, utilization, best recorded visual acuity (BRVA), and safety among eyes with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD), diabetic retinopathy (DR), diabetic macular edema (DME), or retinal vein occlusion (RVO) treated with the biosimilar aflibercept-ayyh (PAVBLU(R)) in routine clinical pract...

PurposeSubretinal drusenoid deposits (SDDs) are a distinct entity in age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and associated with photoreceptor impairment during progression. Their early impact on photoreceptors remains incompletely understood. This study examined photoreceptor reflectivity during the phase when SDDs were not clinically detectable on optical coherence tomography (OCT) using adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (AOSLO). DesignLongitudinal observational study. Participant...

PurposeTo characterize microscopic alteration of photoreceptors and RPE surrounding cuticular drusen in age-related macular degeneration (AMD) using multimodal imaging, including high resolution adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (AOSLO). MethodsEyes with early to intermediate AMD and predominantly cuticular drusen underwent color fundus photography, infrared reflectance, fundus autofluorescence, optical coherence tomography (OCT), and AOSLO. Cuticular drusen were identified using mu...

PurposeQuantitative metrics obtained from retinal fundus images (such as vessel length, tortuosity and other scale-dependent measures) are increasingly used as potential biomarkers for systemic diseases, including cardio- and neurovascular conditions. However, with the increasing prevalence of myopia and related axial growth, this study aims to evaluate if axial length scaling significantly alters the overall distributions of the inferred biomarkers when compared to biomarker data obtained witho...

Purpose: To determine the test-retest reliability of visual function parameters in patients with genetically confirmed Pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE), as a necessary step toward evaluating their suitability as outcome measures in future therapeutic trials. Methods: In this prospective natural history study (PROPXE, ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT05662085), patients with PXE underwent comprehensive visual function evaluation in one study eye at baseline and at a month 2 retest visit. Functional testi...

BackgroundRetinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a leading cause of preventable blindness among preterm infants. Accurate retinal vessel segmentation is crucial for detecting plus disease, which indicates progression to severe ROP. However, manual annotation of vessel masks is laborious and inconsistent, especially in low-resource clinical settings. This study aimed to evaluate a self-supervised vessel extraction pipeline using Frangi-Hessian filtering for automatic pseudo-annotation of unlabeled R...

Regular optical coherence tomography (OCT) monitoring is essential for early detection of retinal disease and timely intervention, but frequent clinicbased imaging burdens patients and healthcare systems. Home-based OCT enables continuous monitoring and reduces clinic visits; however, compact optics and patient-operated acquisition introduce noise, reduced resolution, motion blur, and artifacts that limit clinical reliability and diagnostic confidence. To model home-based OCT acquisition, we emp...

PurposeThere is a need for novel therapies for diabetic retinopathy (DR) because existing therapies treat only certain features of DR and do not work optimally for all patients. While proteomic studies provide insight into disease pathobiology, they are often limited to small sample sizes due to high costs, limiting their generalizability and reproducibility. Moreover, they often yield lists of tens to hundreds of proteins with differential expression, making it difficult to prioritize the most ...

Retinal hyperspectral imaging holds significant promise for early disease diagnosis by quantifying the spectral signatures of metabolic and hemodynamic biomarkers. However, conventional hyperspectral imaging systems typically require extensive scanning, leading to prolonged acquisition times and rendering images susceptible to motion artifacts caused by involuntary eye movements. To address this limitation, we present a snapshot hyperspectral fundus camera employing a microlens array. The system...

PurposeMuller cell (MC) morphology and markers were investigated using histology and immunohistochemistry in an eye with clinically documented multifocal geographic atrophy (GA) and correlated with clinical images. MethodsThe donor was followed clinically for five years and last examined six years before death. The superior posterior pole retina was dissected and immunolabeled with antibodies against glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP; activated MCs and astrocytes) and glutamine synthetase (...

PurposeTo systematically evaluate ocular biometric and systemic laboratory factors associated with cataract in highly myopic eyes and to characterize potential nonlinear associations using an interpretable machine learning approach, thereby providing deeper mechanistic insights into the pathogenesis of highly myopic cataract. DesignA cross-sectional study encompassed 770 eyes of 594 patients with high myopia from Eye & ENT Hospital of Fudan University. SubjectsThe non-cataract control group in...

PurposeGlaucoma, a leading cause of irreversible vision loss, often remains undiagnosed due to its asymptomatic progression and the limitations of existing screening methods. This study aimed to validate an artificial intelligence machine learning algorithm for the camera-agnostic detection of glaucomatous optic neuropathy using macula-centered fundus images. MethodsData were collected from EyePACS, a teleretinal screening system, comprising 25,000 macula-centered fundus images from 12,500 pati...

Fluorescence lifetime imaging ophthalmoscopy permits in vivo assessment of retinal metabolism but has remained limited by insufficient cellular resolution in the human eye. Here we present adaptive optics-enhanced fluorescence lifetime imaging ophthalmoscopy (AOFLIO), a method for single-cell-resolved, in vivo structural and metabolic imaging of the human retinal pigment epithelium (RPE). Through real-time correction of ocular wavefront aberrations, precisely synchronized adaptive optics reflect...

Early screening for glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy (DR) is critical to prevent irreversible vision loss, yet remains inaccessible to many underserved populations. However, AI models trained on hospital-grade fundus images often generalize poorly to low-cost images acquired with portable devices such as smartphones. We proposed CausalFund, a causality-inspired learning framework for training AI models that enable reliable low-resource screening from easily acquired non-clinical images. CausalF...

PurposeTimely detection of disease activity in chronic retinal diseases improves visual outcomes but is limited by the lack of validated systems for continuous monitoring and care management. We evaluated the real-world performance of an integrated remote physiologic monitoring and principal care management program (RemoniHealth(R)) using a self-administered multimodal retinal function test (Macustat(R)) for home monitoring. MethodsThis single-arm real-world intervention study was conducted acr...

This prospective, multicenter, real-world evidence study evaluates the 12-month safety and effectiveness of standalone cyclodialysis with AlloFlo cleft reinforcement for intraocular pressure (IOP) reduction in open-angle glaucoma (OAG). AlloFlo represents the worlds first acellular, allogenic scleral tissue implant, and data from this CREST Study cohort (NCT05506423) contribute critical long-term safety and effectiveness knowledge to the field of extracellular matrix biomaterials research, in ad...

PURPOSEBEST1-associated inherited retinal disease constitutes one of the largest inherited retinal disease patient populations across the world. Innovative therapies are currently in development to address this significant unmet need. To better understand the scale of unmet need, and the distribution of phenotypes and genotypes, we conducted a meta-analysis of BEST1 patients reported in the literature to provide up-to-date patient number estimates. METHODSWe utilized the GeneScape(R) IRD Patien...

PurposeTo evaluate the intra- and inter-grader concordance of anterior segment optical coherence tomography (ASOCT) grading for detection of endothelial plaque in microbial keratitis, and to compare endothelial plaque detection via ASOCT grading versus in-person slit lamp examination. MethodsDiagnostic concordance study of 150 consecutive patients with microbiologically confirmed bacterial or fungal keratitis at a high-volume tertiary eye hospital in India. Two masked ophthalmologist graders in...

PurposeAspheric planning in laser refractive surgery remains difficult: surgeons often rely on empirical nomo-grams or simple linear regression for defocus and astigmatism, while console Q-factor modulation yields a variably predictable effect on asphericity and an inconsistent cross-effect on defocus. This translational methods proof-of-concept frames planning as supervised prediction of console-programmable inputs (de-focus, astigmatism, Q-factor) and evaluates competing models; it is not a cl...

AimTo assess the relationship between pointwise visual field (VF) sensitivity fluctuation and localised glaucoma progression. MethodsRetrospective observational analysis of prospective cohort data from 399 participants (641 eyes) in the African Descent and Glaucoma Evaluation Study (ADAGES). Glaucoma, glaucoma suspect, and control participants underwent annual examinations including VF testing. VF fluctuation was evaluated using the pointwise standard deviation (SD) of total deviation (TD) resi...