Michael Cooper, OD, FAAO, president of Visionary Medical Education, spoke with Glance Wednesday evening on his perspective of the top sessions and hot topics buzzing, from the lecture halls to the Exhibit Hall floor, during Day 2 of the American Academy of Optometry (AAOPT) annual meeting.
Let’s start with the vibe of today.
Overall, it’s been very positive. Beyond the coursework itself, there’s buzz around the meeting regarding the commercial launch of Bausch + Lomb’s MIEBO (perfluorohexyloctane ophthalmic solution) and how eyecare providers can implement this particular medication into their practices.
As we’re looking at dry eye disease (DED) patients with the evaporative component, they’re asking—and I’ve heard this all throughout the meetings—“Where am I going to place this? How am I going to work it into my workflow?”
Speaking of new products …
Obviously, there’s also buzz around the potential product releases that are coming.
Here at Academy, you can look at what’s coming from Alcon regarding the multifocal (MF) lens they’ve just announced: the TOTAL30 MF contact lens (targeting digital device dryness among presbyopes).
With that product, the company is looking to expand its patient reach.
Any competitors to keep an eye on?
Bausch + Lomb.
Take a look at the INFUSE multifocal SiHy contact lens, which launched in the United States this past June.
The company has been expanding its offerings, not just in the vision care section but also in the pharmacy side of its business.
And, of course, there’s MIEBO … but a lot of things are also coming down the road with Xiidra (lifitegrast ophthalmic solution) 5%—which, as you know, B+L just acquired last week.
And from an education perspective, what were some ‘hot topics’?
The key areas I’ve noticed have been on the side of artificial intelligence (AI), neuro, and optical coherence tomography (OCT).
Talk AI to me.
So on the AI side, Jessica Steen, OD, FAAO, presented the course “AI-enabled Ophthalmic Biomedicine: Advancing Health Equity,” which covered how AI fits into public health from the standpoint of how we can actually take that data and apply it to clinical practice.
Along those lines—and a very nascent concept within eyecare in general—is the question of how AI is going to complement the care we provide for our patients.
Too true … now tell me about this neurologic presentation.
The course from Jacqueline Theis, OD, FAAO, on “Neurologic ‘dry eye’” was something that’s dear to my heart because when I was in training, this was not something people really focused on.
It’s become not so much an entity or a disease state, but it’s something that is being talked about more because patients are having some type of neurological deficit, be it from either neurologic corneal pain (NCP) or neurotrophic keratitis (NK).
[Dr. Steen] has a practice that specifically surrounds neurological disease, and so that’s her main focus.
It’s an area that is being explored with a little more detail than it was in the past. Obviously, with Dompé’s (Oxervate [cenegermin]) for NK, that’s a big deal.
We could talk about other esthesiometers for identifying these kinds of patients in our practice:
- Q-tip method
- Cochet Bonnet
And now you have a new one that came to market from Brille Engines, with the first handheld corneal esthesiometer (see here for details).
So, again, it’s all about identification and realization that this is real, paying more attention to it in practice, and the fact that we have treatments for it—with more currently under investigation— whereas in the past, we did not.
And that OCT lecture?
Practical Application of Posterior Segment OCT: Reading Between the Lines by Mohammad Rafieetary, OD, FAAO, focused on OCT, but more specifically, diagnostic technologies.
[Dr. Rafieetary] went through all the idiosyncrasies that we may not always see when we look at a particular OCT image and showed clinicians what they could have potentially missed; he highlighted not just the softballs but also the complexities of a diagnosis.
OCT-A is an area that we’re learning more about as we move on from just the traditional spectral domain (SD)-OCT into more swept-source (SS)-OCT.
Give me an example of this.
With this new technology evolving, we’re getting better imaging clarity and are able to look at specific details, and it’s getting significantly more apparent to us that we’ve probably been missing information because of noise in the system based on image acquisition.
These newer devices are going to help us identify disease states earlier. Specifically with geographic atrophy (GA)—which is obviously a very hot topic in eye care right now from both an optometric and ophthalmic standpoint.
It’s going to help us proactively look at these individuals and be able to discern whether we just watch and monitor these individuals or be really proactive and refer them to our retinal colleagues or general ophthalmology colleagues to manage them, potentially more aggressively with the new therapies that are available now.
Quite a bit to consider. Any final thoughts?
I do want to note that the Exhibit Hall itself is definitely more lively than in recent years. Obviously, that could be a location thing (shout out to New Orleans!), but I think it’s also that we’re getting more back in person, and people are getting more comfortable.
The American Academy of Optometry (AAOPT) annual meeting is being held in New Orleans, Louisiana, October 11-14, 2023.