EURETINA 2024: Ali Erginay, MD, speaks about Red-Blue-Green (RGB) imaging modalities

Ali Erginay, MD, MD, spoke about the important developments in retinal imaging, specifically the Red-Blue-Green (RGB) imaging modalities during his interview with Ophthalmology Times Europe, which took place at the EURETINA 2024 meeting held in Barcelona, Spain, on September 19-22, 2024.

Video Transcript:

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ali Erginay, MD: I'm Dr Ali Erginay. I'm working in [Lariboisière Hospital in] Paris. Our department specializes in retina and retinal imaging. So I had the chance to try, at the very beginning of time, Optos, and I could see all the evolutions of Optos. Recently, the most pronounced, most important development was the integration of RBG color wavelengths. It changed everything, because there were a lot of critics about OCT. People used to say that the images were a little bit greenish. And the critics were right, it was true, it was greenish. But with the addition of blue wave light, it changed everything, because colors became more beautiful.

At the beginning, we were very influenced by the beauty of the images. Then we realized that this was not only a question of beauty: The images were better, more detailed, to facilitate the diagnosis. In my presentation yesterday, I exposed our study that we did in Lariboisière Hospital. We have had chance to have both cameras, side by side. So we chosen about more than about 165 eyes of 200 patients, and we did the examination with both cameras, with 10 minutes of [inaudible]. We realized that with this filter, with this wavelength, with this laser, we could penetrate better. And we saw that with this new technique, you can have better images, even with the cataract. The presence of cataract is very important, because most of the diabetic patients have medium [inaudible]. So even with the cataract, we did 10-minute of intervals in the same patient. It was dramatically better. Even now, I can't explain it. So that's why we decided to do this study.

And we were not very surprised. The study showed us that we could better detect abnormalities, hemorrhages, microaneurysms and intraretinal micro abnormality earmarks better with the new system. Of course, when you detect all those lesions, you can do classification reading much better. And we saw the severity of diabetic patients were a little bit higher with the RGB system. So it's very important.

In conclusion, I can say that images are not only more beautiful, but it improves the diagnosis and detection of lesions. And it's not true only for diabetic patients. Even autofluorescein photos are better. If you have a geographic atrophy or whatever, even lesions in the periphery, retinal detachment, retinal holes, you see them better. The colors are better, and your diagnosis and detection of lesions getting better. So how can we ask for more?

There are a lot of exciting things [at EURETINA], first about new treatments. I saw that geographic atrophy is becoming at last, very dominant. Until now, we've been so focused on wet AMD. Now we are focused on geographic atrophies, and there are new treatments. That's a good thing. And genetic therapy is improving also. And then, third of course, imaging techniques, new machines, especially ultra wide field imaging, including OCT, OCT-A and color photos. Having all those cameras is not enough, because the population is growing. We're getting more and more, we have more and more patients. So artificial intelligence is developing also. They can be integrated into new machines, so they can be used for diagnosis and treatment decision. Those are the points that I like a lot.