ASCRS 2024: What's new in the ESCRS IOL calculator?

At this year's ASCRS meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, physicians focused on what's new and what's next in IOL calculations at a Monday morning symposium. Oliver Findl, MD, delivered an update on recent developments in the ESCRS IOL calculator. Then, he spoke to Ophthalmology Times Europe about what else doctors can expect from ESCRS in 2024.

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

I'm Oliver Findl, from Vienna, Austria. We just had a session now on IOL calculations, and I spoke about the ESCRS calculator. It's out since more than a year now, we already have a toric calculator as well. What I showed is how it works: we essentially use six online formulae. These are the most modern formulae, partially AI-driven, hybrid. So really, the formulae which are the most up to date. And what we do is we essentially use web scraping. That means you enter the data once–your axial length and keratometry values and so forth–and then you get the calculation of all these six calculators. It's free, available online at the ESCRS website, ESCRS.org. What I showed is the data of how these outcomes are, especially for normal eyes but also for short eyes. We see some small differences, but it's essentially, at the end of the day, these fourmulae all do very well. What I also showed is that there's a lot of users. We have 450 users a day already, even though the calculator is relatively new. And we're going to come out with a new calculator, namely for keratoconus. And then hopefully, in Barcelona, in our big meeting in September, we'll come out with the post-refractive calculator. So it's a real powerful tool, which you can use. The nice thing is, you enter data once and get all the results within a click.

So why should you come to ESCRS in Barcelona? I think there's many, many reasons. I mean, Vienna, last year was a huge success. We had more than 10,000 delegates, 5,000 industry, so you know, nearly 15,000 or 16,000 people in that big convention centre. Plus, overall it will probably be even bigger. As things appear now, we have even more abstracts submitted [than in 2023]. So people from all over the world, U.S., of course, South America, but also a lot of Asian and of course European [doctors]. And I think we're going to have some real highlights. One of them is, again, our arena, where we have very interactive discussions. Of course, we have all the main symposia, all the sessions, you know, many, many of them. And also we have an escape room. So we already tried the escape room in Frankfurt. It was an amazing experience, people were very good. So now we're going to have several escape rooms running in parallel, where you can go in, 45 minutes, meet five others which you don't know, build a team, and actually do and try to get out of that room in 45 minutes, with of course, ophthalmic riddles. So a lot of fun. So we've seen in Frankfurt huge success, and now we're taking it to Barcelona in sort of big frame, big time.