According to the National Eye Institute https://nei.nih.gov about 3.9 million infants nationwide are born each year with Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) typically before 31 weeks gestation weighing about 2.75 pounds or less.
The infants diagnosed with ROP often have favorable outcomes, depending on the severity, but it depends on how early they are diagnosed and how they are treated. The problem is that screening for ROP is challenging because pediatric ophthalmologists are highly specialized and in short supply in more remote areas.
Michael Chiang M.D. Pediatric Ophthalmologist at Oregon Health and Science University’s (OHSU) www.ohsu.edu Elks Children’s Eye Clinic, with expertise in ROP and telemedicine has been researching the effectiveness of using highly accurate imaging technologies to diagnose and monitor ROP.
With funding from the Oregon State Elks Association, Dr, Chiang and colleagues have launched a telemedicine collaboration with Salem Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) www.salemhealth.org to monitor premature babies remotely in the NICU.
During the hospital stay, nurse practitioners take picture of the babies eyes using wide angle retina imaging technology and at that point, the images are sent securely to Dr. Chiang’s team in Portland to review.
According to findings recently published by Dr. Chiang in the “Journal of the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus, www.jaapos.org, advances in imaging, computer information, and internet technologies have vastly improved the accuracy of diagnosing and treating premature infants born with ROP via telemedicine.
Dr. Chiang reports, “In general, the field of pediatric ophthalmology has been slow to adopt the same imaging technologies that have revolutionized the practice of general ophthalmology. A survey appearing in the journal “Pediatrics” http://pediatrics.aappublications.org found that retinal imaging devices to screen for primary ROP is used in only seven percent of the babies in NICUs.”
Further research shows that using telemedicine along with retinal imaging devices to diagnose ROP is working. It was found that more than 30 published studies report that telemedicine has very high accuracy for diagnosing clinically significant ROP.