Part 1: Biggest innovations in ophthalmology in 50 years

In celebration of Ophthalmology Times 50th anniversary, we asked leading experts in the field what they see as the biggest innovation in ophthalmology in the last 5 decades.

Video Transcript:

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Poonam Misra, MD:

I think the most transformative thing we've developed over the last 50 years is our diagnostics and our imaging. So especially in glaucoma, we're able to diagnose the disease well before it affects the function, meaning that we're seeing visual field loss much later in the course of patients monitoring, as opposed to years ago, we weren't able to detect subtle differences in their [retinal nerve fiber layer, or] RNFL and [ganglion cell layer, or] GCL.

Lana Rifkin, MD:

So in the over the last 50 years, we've had excellent advances in systemic therapy. Of course, there are still a lot of unmet needs, but my younger patients, for example, when I see children who have been diagnosed with uveitis before these medications were available, they have a lot more complications. They have a lot more sight-threatening sequelae. Whereas now, if a new child, comes to me with uveitis, it's really wonderful to be able to offer them systemic medications and then see them 5, 10 years down the road with no band keratopathy, with no cataract, with no glaucoma. To know that we've come so long in the last 50 years that now we can offer them these benefits, these treatments that allows for them to have normal lives with excellent vision.

Mike Farkas, MD:

In the past 50 years, I think the [adeno-associated virus, or] AAV has shaped the landscape, not only for ophthalmology, but for all of health and medicine. While I'm moving beyond that, it's really directed our focus as to what we can do therapeutically. So that was revolutionary for ophthalmology and for medicine in general.

Sharon Fekrat, MD, FACS, FASRS:

So over the last 50 years, our field ophthalmology as a whole and retina has changed tremendously. In fact, within medicine and health care in general, the field of ophthalmology, and particularly the field of retina, is changing so fast that it's very difficult to keep up with it. It is information overload, and where things are headed, as we can see, as everything converges, I imagine in the future that we will have automated images that individuals take on their smartphone that then go up to the cloud. They are read by a machine learning model, and then the diagnosis and the treatment advice comes out from some of these large language models as well. And then you go to a site, unless the robot comes to you, and you have your procedure done. So we may be hand holders in the future, and so it's very exciting.