EURETINA 2024: Aleksandra Rachitskaya, MD, FASRS, and the Vit-Buckle Society come to Barcelona

Aleksandra Rachitskaya, MD, FASRS, stopped by for a chat during this year's EURETINA congress. She told the Eye Care Network all about the Vit-Buckle Society's symposia on challenging retinal surgical videos, her presentation on the impact of home OCT data in management of neovascular AMD and more.

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

Aleksandra Rachitskaya, MD, FASRS: Hi. My name is Aleksandra Rachitskaya, and I'm a retina specialist at the Cleveland Clinic Cole Eye Institute. Home OCT is a new modality that's going to be available to retina specialists. It's just got approval in the US by the FDA, and what it allows us to do is actually to assess disease activity between visits. Imagine the patients, you know, you see, two patients, both of them between clinic visits have some subretinal fluid. Well, we don't know what happens to that fluid in between the visits, and one patient's might completely go away, and then one patient's might be persistent the whole time. So it really allows us to monitor patients and potentially treat them differently based on this new modality.

With the study that I presented is focued on is the question, "If you had home OCT, would you change the way you treat patients with neovascular AMD?" So we have this fantastic data where the decisions on treatment weren't based on home OCT. They were clinical decisions. So what we did, we took that data and had the retina specialists review as if they were looking at home OCT. They didn't know if the patient was treated in exactly the time point the patient was treated.
So what happened is we saw that in about 42% of patients, the patients actually that it was based on home OCT, the patients wouldn't get treated. And then in in the patients who were treated, in about 61% of patients, the treatment happened a week earlier. So what it means is, if we translate it into clinical practice, what it means is that potentially, with the use of home OCT, can personalise the treatment for patients. Moreover, we can help patients who have excess fluid address the fluid earlier, and the patients who don't need the treatment can be extended. So I think this is a very interesting modality, and it's going to be fascinating to see how we incorporate it into our clinical practice.

So EURETINA this year has been extremely fantastic, and it's such a great pleasure to see a lot of friends and colleagues. I was particularly excited about the course that we did. It was Vit-Buckle Society Symposium. It's the first time we had Vit-Buckle at EURETINA. So I want to thank EURETINA for allowing us to be here. It was a surgical symposium. And I thought for a first-time surgical symposium, I would have 20 people in the room. It was cool, I think it was 500 plus! I don't know the exact count, but it's fantastic. I want to thank all the panelists who participated, they presented amazing surgical cases and had a wonderful discussion.

One thing that I enjoy the most, I like running whenever I come to a new city and a new conference. So I ran by the water, and it was, it was fabulous. It's just such a wonderful view. So very, very, very much appreciated being here in Barcelona for EURETINA.