Instruments: Grand rounds by the seaside

Live demonstrations of clinical techniques are a brave undertaking and to use real patients makes them more so. Hats off then to the team at Heidelberg Engineering for organising a series of evening events last month where local patients were assessed by the Spectralis OCT in front of invited audiences (Figure 1) with the results being discussed with the consultant ophthalmologist responsible for their current management.

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I attended the Torquay event where, initially, the audience were taken through a range of OCT scans of a normal patient (Figure 2). This was followed by the patients sourced from the hospital local eye unit. Despite their age and the presence of lens opacities in each case, the OCT image quality was excellent and none of the patients required dilation. Spectralis uses a confocal scanning laser ophthalmoscope instead of bright flash fundus photography. Imaging is therefore possible through very small pupils (down to 1mm) and also through cataracts (because there’s no bright flash to bounce back off the cataract and the eye tracking system can ‘build’ the image through gaps in the cataract).