Phacoemulsification With Real-Time Remote Collaboration

Ernesto Calvo, MD; Salomon Abouganem, MD; and Eric Rosenberg, DO

Eyetube

Ernesto Calvo, MD, performs routine phacoemulsification using an Apple Vision Pro for intraoperative visualization, taking its feed from the Ngenuity 3D Visualization System (Alcon). The video opens with the surgeon positioning and sizing the operative image within the virtual field before the case begins. This setup takes approximately 5 minutes. Because the view is not confined to the microscope optics, the surgeon's hands remain visible alongside the surgical field, making it possible to watch instrument handling and the transitions between steps. During the case, Eric Rosenberg, DO, joined live from New York, annotating directly on the shared view, with a third surgeon also present on the call. No clinical guidance was given and no surgical decision was influenced. What it demonstrates is that surgeons in separate locations can view and mark up the same operative field in real time.

A New Era of Advanced IOLs

New data on refractive tolerance, visual performance, and visual symptoms suggest that advances in EDOF and FVR IOL technology may broaden patient candidacy.

Cataract and Refractive Surgery Today

Unlocking Clinical Trial Enrollment with AI Screening

It’s not a patient population problem. It’s a signal-extraction problem.

Sunil Gupta, MD, and Joshua Koo, MS, BS

Retina Today

KEY TAKEAWAYS Current clinical trial screening methods rely on physician memory or a manual pre-screener, often leading to missed eligible patients, high screen failure rates, and lagging trial enrollment. An investigational AI model can automatically flag eligible candidates, allowing the physician to initiate the trial conversation and potential formal screening on the same day. Using the AI system allowed the Retina Specialty Institute to bring a protocol live in about 4 weeks. Every practice that runs clinical trials knows a particular kind of frustration. You open a new protocol for geographic atrophy, wet AMD, or diabetic macular edema, confident that patient volume will fill it. And then you watch enrollment crawl. The reflex is to assume the shortfall is a supply problem: not enough patients. However, in a busy retina clinic, the eligible patients are there—the problem isn’t patient scarcity, it’s patient identification. On any given clinic day, dozens of patients have the conditions our open protocols were written to study, and the information needed to identify them as trial candidates is already in the record: acuity measurements, medical and treatment histories, laterality notes, and OCT scans. However, we still need a dependable way to identify that information quickly for each patient.