ESCRS 2023: Data-driven innovation in the glaucoma space with Keith Barton

Data-driven patient care was one of the main themes at this year’s European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons (ESCRS) meeting in Vienna, Austria. That motif came to life in many presentations, including one official microinvasive glaucoma surgery (MIGS) session with Keith Barton, MD, FRCP, FRCS, FRCOphth, Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon, Moorfields Eye Hospital,and Professor of Ophthalmology, University College, London.

During the programme, Prof Barton presented interim 12-month data from the iTrack™ Global Data Registry. For 18 months, Nova Eye Medical, the team behind the iTrack™ and iTrack™ Advance canaloplasty platform, collected data on that procedure through the International Glaucoma Surgery Registry. Prof Barton stopped by the Ophthalmology Times Europe booth to tell us more about that longitudinal, multicentre data set.

Editor’s note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Keith Barton: Hi, I'm Keith Barton, Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London and Professor of Ophthalmology at University College London. At ESCRS, I'm presenting a number of things. We ran an innovation meeting on Thursday called Ophthalmology Futures, which is largely an industry investor event. I was presenting on glaucoma surgery and uveitis at the Glaucoma Day yesterday, and I'm involved in presenting a MIGS course on Monday as well as the International Glaucoma Surgery collaboration with Nova Eye Medical for the International iTrack registry.

It's been useful to highlight the International Glaucoma Surgery Registry, which Nova Eye Medical afford their global iTrack database. This is an open, fully-anonymized, web-based...surgical registry of all types of glaucoma surgery from SLT up to drainage implants. And the beauty of it is that it's real-world data. We have any surgeons from all over the world. It's not, it's not limited to one country. We have surgeons from North America, Australasia, Europe, entering data. And so far since its inception, we have 7,500 new patients and roughly 40,000 follow-ups on, as I mentioned, a broad portfolio of glaucoma surgical procedures.

And the real attraction of this is that you will never probably find hard comparative data for all the various types of new procedures there are. But the, the registry will highlight how they perform relative to each other to some degree. And to the surgeon, it offers the individual surgeon an audit of their own surgical outcomes. Both interventions afterwards, complications, success rates, everything, it prints out their, their performance in relation to the entire registry, but it doesn't name and shame anyone. But for those who need to audit in their practice, this is a very easy way to provide a nice portfolio of audit outcomes.

It's highlighted for the iTrack and the 367 patients, I believe, at 12 months, that you're getting a 20% pressure reduction, 50% reduction in medication. And this is this is not, admittedly, trial data, it's real world data. But it shows what a group of surgeons from around the world are are producing. And it's actually very exciting, I think.

Next in the registry is to be able to just simply keep expanding, to keep up within the number of new procedures that are available. And the more of them–we have almost every new procedure on the registry, [inaudible] as different surgeons do different procedures. So then hopefully, we will be one of the few registries that actually has real-world data across the whole spectrum of glaucoma surgery while also working to provide individual companies with their own outcomes, in a structured fashion. And to keep enhancing the surgeon's own audit page, which is, we think, is particularly valuable. In fact, I use it for my own appraisals each year...It's second to none in terms of the appraisal outcome it can produce.