Refining what clinicians see and treat in outer retinal disease with Christine Curcio, PhD

Christine A. Curcio, PhD, spoke to the Eye Care Network about her presentation at the 2025 International SPECTRALIS Symposium – And Beyond (ISS). At this year's ISS meeting, held on 13 and 14 June in Heidelberg, Germany, Prof Curcio spoke on histology and optical coherence tomography (OCT) interpretation. She recounted details of that lecture in the above video.

Curcio is the emerita professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine, in Birmingham, Alabama. Prof Curcio and her team use volume electron microscopy to correlate high-resolution tissue data with OCT B-scans. New techniques in histology are refining the way clinicians use software tools, and the OCT nomenclature used to describe findings, Prof Curcio said.

“We built on the success of the 2014 international OCT consensus by Staurenghi et al,” Curcio said. She refers here to a landmark framework, developed by clinicians in Italy, the United Kingdom, California and New York, published in Ophthalmology.¹ The consensus introduced terms, such as ellipsoid zone and interdigitation zone, which are a key aspect of retinal research today. A detailed and accurate imaging framework is crucial to understanding retinal disease, she noted. “Attention to precision is really essential,” she said.

Reference

1. Staurenghi G, Sadda S, Chakravarthy U, Spaide RF; International Nomenclature for Optical Coherence Tomography (IN•OCT) Panel. Proposed lexicon for anatomic landmarks in normal posterior segment spectral-domain optical coherence tomography: the IN•OCT consensus. Ophthalmology. 2014;121(8):1572-1578. doi:10.1016/j.ophtha.2014.02.023