Dr. Jennifer Lim Opens the New Academic Year’s Vision Seminar Series

Jennifer Lim, MD, the Marion H. Schenk Chair Professor of Ophthalmology, and the director of the Retina Service, University of Illinois at Chicago, Illinois Eye and Ear Infirmary in Chicago, was the honorable first Vision Seminar guest for the new academic year.

She skillfully summarized the history and the current clinical approach to the diagnosis and management of sickle cell retinopathy. She emphasized that the era of advances in retinal imaging allows new discovery of subclinical sickle cell retinopathy even when no findings are visible clinically.

She demonstrated how new imaging modalities add to the classic clinical staging system that was described earlier by Mort Goldberg, MD prior to the development of advanced imaging modalities.

Dr. Lim demonstrated the value of SD-OCT and OCTA in patients with sickle cell disease, where funduscopic photography may show minimal findings, and OCT imaging may show focal areas of retinal thinning corresponding to areas of retinal infarction. “OCTA vascular fractal analysis may serve as a future biomarker for early diagnosis of the retinal manifestations of sickle cell disease”, she said.

Dr. Lim and her colleagues at UIC conduct innovative research to develop artificial intelligence algorithms for the automated diagnosis of sickle retinopathy.