Eyeworld Daily News

20 | EYEWORLD DAILY NEWS | APRIL 22, 2022 ASCRS ANNUAL MEETING DAILY NEWS E yecelerator@ASCRS began Thursday morning with an intro- duction from leadership and a focus on where digital health is going in ophthalmology. "This is our third iteration," ASCRS Executive Director Steve Speares said of the Eyecelerator meeting, which was formed as a partnership between ASCRS and AAO. "This is a business meeting, and the business of ophthalmology is very important to the American Society of Cataract & Refractive Surgery and the American Academy of Ophthalmology." Stephen McLeod, MD, CEO of AAO, said that fostering innovation to change the way we do things for our patients is the goal of Eyecelerator. Eyecelerator Program Director Gil Kliman, MD, said Eyecelerator focus- es on disruptive innovation, not only incremental steps forward but break- throughs that are going to improve patient care and change the ophthal- mic landscape. With Eyecelerator being the "in- tersection of industry, unmet needs, and ophthalmology," Eric Donnenfeld, MD, kicked off the programming, introducing the topic of "Digital Health Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye." Elizabeth Yeu, MD, who moder- ated the session, said that medicine has often lagged behind the world of digitization, but it's catching up. Eric Rosenberg, DO, introduced the new Digital Ophthalmic Society, which he said is a multifaceted nonprofit organization whose mission and vision is aligned with ASCRS. The society will aid in advancement of ophthalmic surgery, digital surgical visualization, digital health systems, image-guidance, telemedicine, and more. The Digital Ophthalmic Society will help members hone their skillset and provide neces- sary tools to stay one step ahead, Dr. Rosenberg said. Ranya Habash, MD, took on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI), giving an overview of how AI works. "One of the things we try to teach the machine is to think like a human … but the main difference here is neuroplas- ticity. Machines can't learn the same way," she said. In terms of learning, Dr. Habash gave the example of differentiating be- tween a dog and a cat. Both have four legs and tails, but one has whiskers and the other barks. You keep trying to show the machine the difference between the two. The same is true for machine learning for ophthalmology. For example, you show it what it looks like when an eye has diabetic retinopa- thy and when it doesn't, and eventually it learns, Dr. Habash said. "We weigh different inputs. … At the end, when the machine comes out with the right or wrong answer, we weigh the weights differently to get the answer we want," she said. In this respect, you know the an- swer when you're training the system, but this isn't how humans learn. So, Dr. Habash said they've started to teach machines to learn forward following Hebb's rule. Currently machines are be- ing taught using both forward learning and back propagation, Dr. Habash said. Grayson Armstrong, MD, spoke on telemedicine. He described the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially the early shutdown of clinics. "You would think ophthalmologists would run toward telemedicine as a solution, but did they? The answer is no." He went on to describe how telemedicine presents an opportunity as we face an aging population and expect an overwhelming demand for services. There are a few models of telemedicine, but he said he envisions a hybrid telemedicine model being the future. He said there is a need to define the education and curricula for telemedicine as well as a need to define best practices. He said, "we need to make sure these models of care are better than the gold standard." Closing out the session, Hunter Cherwek, MD, gave an overview of Orbis' focus on digital health, specif- ically its Cybersight digital training hubs. He said more than 5,000 people start training with this program every month, with nearly every country in the world having training courses. There are e-consult services and peer- to-peer mentorship. While there is the saying "practice makes perfect," Dr. Cherwek said that "perfect practice makes perfect," highlighting the impor- tance of standardized training, like that provided through Cybersight. "What does this mean for business? All of these are business development tools. … We have a lot of industry peo- ple taking our courses," Dr. Cherwek said. Editors' note: The presenters have finan- cial interests with various ophthalmic companies. Focus on digital health at Eyecelerator Dr. Rosenberg describes the Digital Ophthalmic Society to Eyecelerator attendees.

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