Andreas Pollreisz, MD, encourages taking a second look with OCT-A

This year, the European Society of Retina Specialists (EURETINA) held its annual congress in Paris, France. During the meeting, Andreas Pollreisz, MD, came by the Ophthalmology Times Europe and Modern Retina booth for an interview.

An assistant professor of ophthalmology at Medical University of Vienna in Austria, Pollreisz presented two imaging talks at the 25th EURETINA meeting. During the EURETINA session on diabetic retinopathy and diabetic macular edema, he answered a common imaging question of the modern era, turning his attention to optical coherence tomography angiography, or OCT-A. In the symposium, he discussed whether widefield OCT-A is a "must-have" technology or simply "nice to have."

"How I approach it at the moment is that I use widefield fluorescence angiography as the kind of first examination to see where damage is present in the retina, and then I can follow these areas using widefield OCT-A," Prof. Pollreisz said. He noted that, at the moment, OCT-A is not capable of reaching the same areas that he can image using ultrawidefield fluorescence angiography. "However, in the years to come, I see that in widefield OCT-A the field of view will extend, and I think then we might have the chance that OCT-A will replace fluorescence angiography when analyzing peripheral areas," he predicted.

Watch the full video to hear Prof. Pollreisz's clinical wisdom for using new imaging technologies in a real-world setting, including success stories of patients with diabetic eye disease.