Active clinical trials for "Retinal Diseases"

In Brazil 10% of the adult population has diabetes. Of these, 39.0% are undiagnosed, at risk for developing complications such as diabetic retinopathy (DR). Due to the increasing prevalence of diabetes and high percentage of patients with uncontrolled disease, cost-effective tools are needed with focused attention on diabetes prevention and management in the current health system. The automatic retinopathy detection can enlarge the screening, reducing the workload and costs compared to manual image graders.

Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a disorder of development of the neural retina and its vasculature that may impact vision in vulnerable preterm neonates for a lifetime. This study utilizes new technology to determine visual and neurological development of very preterm infants in the intensive care nursery, during a period of rapid growth of the retina, optic nerve and brain. The long-term goal of this study is to help improve preterm infant health care via objective bedside imaging and analysis that characterizes early critical indicators of poor vision, neurological development and ROP, which will rapidly translate to better early intervention and improved future vision care.

More than 29 million people in the US are living with diabetes, many of whom will develop diabetic retinopathy (DR) or diabetic macular edema (DME) collectively known as diabetic eye disease (DED), the leading cause of vision loss and blindness in working-age adults. Annual eye screening is recommended for all diabetic patients since vision loss can be prevented with laser photocoagulation and anti-VEGF treatment if DR is diagnosed in its early stages. Currently, the number of clinical personnel trained for DR screening is orders of magnitude smaller than that needed to screen the large, growing diabetic population. Therefore, to meet this large unmet need for DR screening, a fully-automated computerized DR screening system is necessary. EyeArt is an automated screening device designed automatically analyze color fundus photographs of diabetic patients to identify patients with referable or vision threatening DED. This study is designed to assess the safety and efficacy of EyeArt.

The primary objective of this clinical study is to compare the Nidek RS-3000 Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) device to the Optovue RTVue OCT. The secondary objective is to evaluate any adverse events found during the clinical study.

The objective of this research is to improve the care of ocular disease and disorders, in particular the changes in the eye associated with diabetes, by providing clinicians with dramatically improved ultrasonic images of the entire eye. The research combines advanced high-frequency, high-resolution ultrasonic annular arrays transducers with new processing techniques designed to overcome several limits that have been reached with conventional high frequency ultrasound systems. The investigators propose that diagnosis of eye diseases using annular arrays can be more effective than the conventional ultrasound images by at least 50%; i.e., that for every 2 posterior vitreous detachments detected conventionally, 3 will be detected with the annular arrays.

The purpose of this study is to identify eyes that show worsening and disease progression (progressor phenotypes).

A variety of studies demonstrate that ocular blood flow is altered in diabetes and retinal perfusion abnormalities have been proposed to contribute to the pathogenesis of diabetic retinopathy. Various animal and human studies have demonstrated that retinal and optic nerve blood flow increase in response to diffuse luminance flicker. Based on studies with ERG, this effect has been attributed to augmented activity in the retinal ganglion cells and associated axons indicating a coupling mechanism between neuronal activity and retinal blood flow. Whereas a variety of studies describe the effects of flickering light on retinal and optic nerve head blood flow, the knowledge about this coupling in the diabetic retina is sparse. In view of the fact that neural activity and blood flow are strongly coupled in the human retina, one could hypothesize that neurodegenerative changes in the retina could contribute to the vascular dysregulation and in turn lead to changes of ocular perfusion. The investigators set out to investigate whether the coupling of neural activity and blood flow is impaired in patients with early stage diabetic retinopathy compared to those in healthy volunteers.

To evaluate the impact of telemedicine system in rural hospitals for diagnosis and treatment of Diabetes retinopathy and Diabetes macular edema.

PDR is a leading cause of irreversible vision loss in North America. This disease is caused by the growth of abnormal blood vessels in the retina. These abnormal blood vessels can bleed inside the eye, causing a vitreous hemorrhage (VH). Sometimes when patients have this bleeding, a surgery called vitrectomy is required to remove the blood from within the eye. In order to reduce complications during the surgery, most retina surgeons will inject Avastin into the eye a few days before the surgery. Avastin (bevacizumab) is currently not approved by Health Canada to treat any ocular disease. Lucentis (ranibizumab) is approved by Health Canada as a treatment for age-related macular degeneration, diabetic macular edema, and retinal venous occlusive disease. While Avastin is not approved by Health Canada for the treatment of these diseases, the majority of retina specialists around the world are now using Avastin "off-label" to treat these diseases. That is because Avastin and Lucentis both tend to work equally well in these disease, but Avastin is significantly cheaper. While Avastin and Lucentis are generally regarded to be equal, there may be some differences between these two drugs that have not been discovered. The aim of this study is to look for these differences. Previous research by the investigators in this study has shown that injecting Avastin into eyes causes increased inflammatory proteins to develop inside the eye. This increase in these proteins was related to complications that developed after the vitrectomy surgery. Lucentis may be associated with less of an increase in inflammatory proteins (and less complications). The aim of this study will be to compare Avastin and Lucentis with respect to how they affect inflammatory proteins in the eye, as well as the rate of complications during surgery. Study participants will be divided into two arms ("groups") of 30 subjects. Subjects will receive Avastin or Lucentis a few days before vitrectomy surgery. The assignment will be random and the study is double-masked. Masking is done so that the investigators can clearly determine any differences between the 2 drugs.

Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness in the developed world. The causes of the disease are poorly understood. One of the earliest changes that occur in the retinas of diabetic patients, well before overt retinopathy is observed, is a reduction in light-evoked increases in blood flow in retinal vessels. The loss of this vascular response may lead to retinal hypoxia and it has been suggested that hypoxia could be a principal cause of diabetic retinopathy. The long-term goals of this project are to determine whether decreased blood flow in diabetic patients and the resulting retinal hypoxia contributes to the development of diabetic retinopathy and whether restoration of normal blood flow in diabetic patients slows or prevents the development of retinopathy.