Californian retinal imaging expert visits Cologne

Dr. SriniVas Sadda came to Cologne to visit the Cologne Image Reading Center (CIRCL) on January 27th, 2017. Dr. Sadda is President & Chief Scientific Officer of the Doheny Eye Institute in Los Angeles, CA, USA and an internationally highly renowned expert in the diagnosis and treatment of (chorio-) retinal diseases, with a particular strength in the area of retinal imaging. He is the editor of “Retina”, the definitive book for retinal experts around the world. In 2006, Dr. Sadda founded the Doheny Image Reading Center (DIRC). With over 80 employees, it now is the largest in the world (http://dirc.doheny.org/). In 2014, the Doheny Eye Institute formed an alliance with the Stein Eye Institute of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

Prof. Sandra Liakopoulos, who is the head of the Cologne Image Reading Center at the Department of Ophthalmology and an affiliate of the DFG research unit FOR 2240 “Angiogenesis, lymphangiogenesis and cellular immunity in inflammatory diseases of the eye” hosted Dr. Sadda. In 2006 / 2007, Prof. Liakopoulos was trained under Dr. Sadda’s supervision in retinal image interpretation at the DIRC. His expertise and advice was highly appreciated by the CIRCL team.

Dr. Sadda gave a talk on the latest developments in imaging the choroid with Fourier Domain Optical Coherence Tomography. How choroidal thickness measurements and an analysis of the choroidal anatomy using high resolution OCT imaging are relevant for differential diagnosis were among the topics addressed, as well as the relevance of such measurements and analyses for the follow-up of patients with choroioretinal diseases such as pachychoroid spectrum disease (e.g. central serous retinopathy) or age-related macular degeneration. He further described the methodology of normalized signal intensity measurements of the choroid and pointed out the relevance of this parameter for differential diagnosis of chorioretinal diseases.