UMass Presence at the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) Annual Meeting

The American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) is the world’s largest association of eye physicians and surgeons. The AAO is a global community of 32,000 medical doctors, which protect sight and empower lives by setting the standards for ophthalmic education and advocating for our patients and the public. AAO innovates to advance the ophthalmology profession and to ensure the delivery of the highest-quality eye care. The AAO annual meeting was held this year in San Francisco, California https://www.aao.org/annual-meeting. Among more than 15,000 participants, UMass team was selected to present in one of the two Retina Section Original Papers. The paper presented was titled: Novel Multi-Modal Image Analysis to Quantify Pentosan Polysulfate Sodium (Elmiron) Retinal Toxicity Demonstrates an Exponential Dose-Response Curve.

It aimed to develop a novel multi-modal image analysis to quantify Elmiron retinal toxicity and to investigate the mathematic correlation between cumulative dose and retinal toxicity. Dr. Shlomit Schaal, senior author and presenter of this paper at AAO said: “This study is first to demonstrate the exponential dose-response correlation between exposure to Elmiron and retinal toxicity.The novel multi-modal image analysis techniques present an opportunity to quantify the correlations between chronic exposure to systemic medications and retinal toxicity even in patients without obvious morphological macular changes”.

This study was recently accepted for publication in Ophthalmology Journal, the leading scientific journal in the field of ophthalmology. Fist author, Dr. Aviel Hadad, was funded by the Frederick Krupp Medical Education Fund to perform the study at UMass. Other authors include Dr. Omar Helmy, a PGY-1 student, who was recently selected to the newly established UMass ophthalmology residency program, and Sam Leeman, the department’s Research Coordinator.

(Left to Right) Dr. Shlomit Schaal and Dr. Aviel Hadad