Retina Implants have the purpose to restore visual perception in blind patients suffering from retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and eventually also age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Electrical stimulation of the remaining retinal nerve fibre layers leads to visual sensations (phosphenes) [1, 2]. Our retina implant consisting of a light sensitive CMOS chip (1,500 pixels) and 16 separate direct st...

I n their prospective population-based cohort study of 2389 patients in the Blue Mountains region in Australia, Liew and colleagues report on the association of long-term use of low-dose aspirin and age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness in Western countries. The principal finding is that regular aspirin use is associated with an approximately 2.5fold greater ris...

Cutaneous lupus erythematosus is a previously undiagnosed side-effect of ranibizumab. Here, we present a case of an 82-year-old female Caucasian patient with wet age-related macular degeneration. Following a single intraocular injection of Lucentis (ranibizumab), she developed a subacute cutaneous lupus erythematosus which, with treatment, took nearly 12 months to resolve. This shows that cutan...

We mapped a new X-linked recessive atrophic macular degeneration locus to Xp21.1-p11.4 and show allelic involvement of the gene RPGR, which normally causes severe peripheral retinal degeneration leading to global blindness. Ten affected males whom we examined had primarily macular atrophy causing progressive loss of visual acuity with minimal peripheral visual impairment. One additional male sh...

Pathological neovascularization is a key component of the neovascular form (also known as the wet form) of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and proliferative diabetic retinopathy. Several preclinical studies have shown that antiangiogenesis strategies are effective for treating neovascular AMD in animal models. Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is one of the main inducers of ocula...

Disclosures This study was sponsored by Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals. Medical writing support was provided by PAREXEL and was funded by Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals. Current Management and Barriers to Treatment for Wet Age-Related Macular Degeneration (wAMD): Perspectives From Patients and Caregivers Monica Varano1, Nicole Eter2, Steve Winyard3, Kim U. Wittrup-Jensen4, Julie Heraghty5, ...

This paper presents a disease-oriented evaluation of two recent retinal image registration algorithms, one for aligning pairs of retinal images and one for simultaneously aligning all images in a set. Medical conditions studied include diabetic retinopathy, vein occlusion, and both dry and wet age-related macular degeneration. The multi-image alignment worked virtually flawlessly, missing only ...

We developed a photoacoustic ocular imaging device and demonstrated its utility in imaging the deeper layers of the eye including the retina, choroid, and optic nerve. Using safe laser intensity, the photoacoustic system was able to visualize the blood distribution of an enucleated pig's eye and an eye of a living rabbit. Ultrasound images, which were simultaneously acquired, were overlaid on t...