What technology do you use in AMD treatment?

What technology do I use in AMD treatment? Well, the first thing to say is that the treatment of AMD starts with making the diagnosis. First, I need to see you in the clinic to establish what the problem is, to determine whether you have AMD or not and the specific type of AMD and the severity of the problem itself.

Diagnosing AMD before treatment

During a clinic consultation, we put eye drops in to dilate the pupils and have a look at the back of the eye and examine your eyes in the initial instance. After that, we use advanced diagnostic technology to hone the diagnosis further. That allows us to be very specific about your problem and indeed the severity of any retinal changes.

AMD treatment technology

One of the technologies we use is called Optical Coherence Tomography imaging or OCT imaging. This imaging uses a modified camera system and measures the reflectivity of light from the back of the eye (the retina) where the light-sensitive cells are. That allows us to build up a cross-sectional image of the back of your eye to a few thousandths of a millimetre detail – a highly specific and highly precise way of making a diagnosis. OCT imaging is rapid and painless and works without the need to touch the eye during the OCT scan.

Another tool or diagnostic technology we use is called fundus fluorescein angiography. This involves an injection of a fluorescent dye (fluorescein) into your arm which allows us to visualise the blood vessels at the back of the eye and identify any points of leakage or bleeding. That means that we can again target treatment to the appropriate problem. Fortunately, we’re using that technology less, and we can make the diagnosis without any injection treatments into the arm using OCT imaging technology.

The last point I want to get across is that things are changing. We’ve seen a revolution in the way we manage people with age-related macular degeneration not only concerning treatment but also regarding diagnosis.

One of the latest tools or techniques we use is called OCT angiography. This device is particularly exciting because it means that we can visualise blood flow in the back of your eye – in the tiny capillaries and retinal blood vessels – using light or the reflectivity of light. It takes seconds to do and uses infrared light to scan across the retina. These new technologies enable me to provide you with an individualised, precise diagnosis which is the first step on the road to providing treatment.