Home OCT with AI may be feasible for patients with wet AMD
WAILEA, Hawaii — The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way physicians monitor age-related macular degeneration, and Nancy M. Holekamp, MD, believes those changes are here to stay.
“We all learned that remote monitoring of our patients is desirable, even if there isn’t a pandemic,” she said in her presentation at Retina 2021. “It currently exists with monitoring patients with intermediate AMD, and there’s a whole cloud infrastructure around monitoring our patients and having them come in when there are signs of active disease in wet macular degeneration.”
In her presentation, Holekamp discussed the potential of the Notal Home OCT and Notal OCT Analyzer (Notal Vision) for tracking day-to-day progress of fluid in patients with wet AMD. She said having this data can give clinicians the ability to better tailor treatment by alerting patients the moment an issue arises, rather than having to wait for a visit.
“One benefit could be to catch and treat wet macular degeneration as soon as possible,” she said. “Another potential benefit is providing physicians with unique intervisit disease knowledge, what’s actually going on in the retina in our patients when we’re not seeing them.”
Using the device, patients can scan their eyes themselves, which takes about 45 seconds per eye. After that, Holekamp said the data are transmitted to the cloud where an artificial intelligence algorithm identifies, localizes, quantifies and maps the fluid in the eye. From there, physicians can check the data on the cloud or set an alert that will notify them when the fluid hits a certain level that might be concerning.
In the first feasibility study out of Germany, patients with AMD performed 805 scans on 538 eyes using prototypes of the Notal OCT device. Most of the patients were able to successfully scan and upload their data themselves, and compared with commercial in-office OCT, the positive and negative percentage agreement of fluid identification was 97% and 95%, respectively.
“That’s a huge hurdle right off the bat that elderly patients that may not see well can scan themselves with a high level of success,” Holekamp said.
Holekamp is one of the lead investigators of the first feasibility study of the device in the United States. Enrollment is nearly complete, and results are expected to be presented at a scientific meeting later this year.
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Holekamp NM. Home OCT for monitoring nAMD. Presented at: Retina 2021; May 8-14, 2021; Wailea, Hawaii.
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