EyeWorld is the official news magazine of the American Society of Cataract & Refractive Surgery.
Issue link: https://digital.eyeworld.org/i/422211
69 December 2014 EW MEETING REPORTER APACRS opens with lamp lighting and Arthur Lim tribute The APACRS opening ceremony began with a welcome from the local host, Abhay Vasavada, MD, Ahmedabad, India. "Welcome to Jaipur, the jewel in the crown of India, for this 27th APACRS annual meeting," he said. Dr. Vasavada expressed his pleasure to host the delegates, faculty, and trade part- ners on behalf of APACRS. "There is a stellar faculty and involvement of cataract and refractive societies around the planet, and we will surely be able to take home useful jewels from the meeting," he said. Graham Barrett, MD, Perth, Australia, president of the APACRS, gave his welcome address, beginning with his pathway through APACRS. This started when he had a chance to meet Arthur S.M. Lim, MD, for the first time. Prof. Lim was a very special individual who shared the idea of establishing a society that would travel through Asia and hold meetings and use these meetings to develop a network of colleagues to share information and transfer skills, Dr. Barrett said. "Eventually this dream of his became a reality as we established the society in many different countries in our region." Dr. Barrett's journey in APACRS was also significantly impacted in 1996 when he was asked by Prof. Lim to take over the leadership of the organization. Dr. Barrett said that his own dream for APACRS was for the organization to become a represen- tative of equal stature in the region as other societies like the American Society of Cataract & Refractive Sur- gery (ASCRS), the European Society of Cataract & Refractive Surgeons (ESCRS), and the Latin American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons (ALACCSA-R/LASCRS) around the world. He believes that this goal has been achieved and has only happened by the energy, enthusiasm, and creativity of all the ophthalmologists and surgeons who participate in the APACRS meeting. Not only does India continue the tradition, Dr. Barrett said, but it ex- cels in this field in so many areas. "When I think back on the various meetings, it's not neces- sarily the lectures I remember, but the friendships," he said. All this would not have begun without the vision of founder Prof. Lim, he said. "Everything he did was done with enthusiasm and joy," Dr. Barrett said, expressing his hope that the society will be able to keep Prof. Lim's spirit in the continued activities of APACRS. Following Dr. Barrett's address, 1 minute of silence was held in tribute of the late Prof. Lim. Representatives of regional and national societies involved with the meeting were then called on stage to participate in a lamp lighting ceremony. Societies represented included the Chinese Cataract Soci- ety, Indonesian Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, Intraocular Implant and Refractive Society India, Korean Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, Philippine Society of Cataract and Refrac- tive Surgery, the Royal College of Ophthalmologists of Thailand, Asia Cornea Society, ASCRS, ESCRS, and ALACCSA-R/LASCRS. In the lamp lighting ceremony, the light repre- sented knowledge, while darkness represented ignorance; knowledge removes ignorance just as light re- moves darkness. The lighting of the lamp signified the commencement of the meeting. The 2014 APACRS awards were also presented. Ronald Yeoh, MD, Singapore, presented Dr. Vasavada with the 2014 APACRS Gold Medal Award. He spoke of Dr. Vasavada's achievements and of his friendship. "We are nothing without our patients, and his dedication to his patients is a testimony to the character of the man," Dr. Yeoh said. Prior to the APACRS Lim Lecture by Warren Hill, MD, Mesa, Ariz., Dr. Barrett introduced Dr. Hill. He has devoted his career to helping fellow surgeons obtain more accurate out- comes, Dr. Barrett said. APACRS Lim Lecture highlights the latest innovations in IOL calculations Dr. Hill talked about the benefits of technology transfer and its impacts on ophthalmology in the 2014 APACRS Lim Lecture. Innovation often comes from having a network of friends, ac- quaintances, and colleagues that allow you to take things to the next level, Dr. Hill said in the lecture, and IOL calculations are one example of that type of collaboration. "So many things that we do in ophthalmology come from other places," Dr. Hill said. "It's not so much that we have to be smart enough to know exactly what to do, but sometimes [we have to be] smart enough to know who to talk to." A new IOL power calculation method, developed by Dr. Hill and colleagues both within and outside of ophthalmology, integrates aspects of established calculation method- ologies from unrelated fields to offer better patient safety and physician confidence in refractive outcomes. Dr. Hill began by discussing current refractive outcomes achieved by cataract surgeons. Less than 1% of individual surgeons achieve accu- racies of half a diopter or less more than 92% of the time, he said. The vast majority of surgeons achieve half diopter accuracies around 78%, he said, so there is a vast need for innovations in power calculation formulas. Fear of having a refractive sur- prise or an unhappy patient pushes many cataract surgeons in the direc- tion of maintaining familiarity, Dr. Hill said, but improving refractive outcomes requires surgeons to be innovators who readily embrace and seek change. Borrowing technology is not a new concept in ophthalmology— optical biometry is based on the Michelson interferometer used to measure the diameter of stars, and Charles Kelman, MD, introduced phacoemulsification after seeing an ultrasonic probe in his dentist's office during a teeth cleaning. Dr. Hill's IOL calculation method borrows engineering-based interpolation methods that are used in facial recognition software, modeling oil well behavior, diesel engine calibration, and even financial forecasting. "This is not new technology," Dr. Hill said. "It is pervasive, it's just never been used in ophthalmology." The method utilizes a radial basis function (RBF), a sophisticat- ed pattern-recognition algorithm. RBFs are able to deal with non-linear factor relationships—such as the re- lationship between axial length and central corneal power—and provide better outcomes with less data. The advantage of RBFs is that they utilize adaptive learning—the ability to learn how to perform a task (or calculation) based on data, independent of what is already known, Dr. Hill said. View it now: APACRS 2014 ... EWrePlay.org Boris Malyugin, MD, PhD, Moscow, Russia, describes pearls for using the Malyugin ring in small pupil patients undergoing femtosecond cataract surgery. continued on page 70