Non‐Uremic Calciphylaxis (NUC) is a rare condition that often manifests as intractable and painful integumentary wounds, afflicting patients with a high burden of co‐morbidity. The Endocannabinoid System (ECS) is a ubiquitous signalling system that is theorised to be dysregulated within wound beds and associated peri‐wound tissues. Preclinical research has shown that the dominant chemical classes derived from the cannabis plant, cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids, interact with the integumentary ECS to promote wound closure and analgesia. This is a prospective open label cohort study involving two elderly Caucasian females with recalcitrant NUC leg ulcers of greater than 6 months duration. Topical Cannabis‐Based Medicines (TCBM) composed of cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids were applied daily to both the wound bed and peri‐wound tissues until complete wound closure was achieved. Wounds were photographed regularly, and the digital images were subjected to planimetric analysis to objectively quantify the degree of granulation and epithelization. Analgesic utilisation, as a surrogate/proxy for pain scores, was also tracked. The cohort had a mean M3 multimorbidity index score of 3.31. Complete wound closure was achieved in a mean of 76.3 days. Additionally, no analgesics were required after a mean of 63 days. The treatments were well tolerated with no adverse reactions. The positive results demonstrated in very challenging wounds such as NUC, among highly complex patients, suggest that TCBM may have an even broader role within integumentary and wound management. This treatment paradigm warrants being trialled in other wound types and classes, and ultimately should be subjected to randomised controlled trials.
Perimetry and optical coherence tomography (OCT) are both used to monitor glaucoma progression. However, combining these modalities can be a challenge due to differences in data types. To overcome this, we have developed an autoencoder data fusion (AEDF) model to learn compact encoding (AE-fused data) from both perimetry and OCT. The AEDF model, optimized specifically for visual field (VF) progression detection, incorporates an encoding loss to ensure the interpretation of the AE-fused data is similar to VF data while capturing key features from OCT measurements. For model training and evaluation, our study included 2504 longitudinal VF and OCT tests from 140 glaucoma patients. VF progression was determined from linear regression slopes of longitudinal mean deviations. Progression detection with AE-fused data was compared to VF-only data (standard clinical method) as well as data from a Bayesian linear regression (BLR) model. In the initial 2-year follow-up period, AE-fused data achieved a detection F1 score of 0.60 (95% CI: 0.57 to 0.62), significantly outperforming (p < 0.001) the clinical method (0.45, 95% CI: 0.43 to 0.47) and the BLR model (0.48, 95% CI: 0.45 to 0.51). The capacity of the AEDF model to generate clinically interpretable fused data that improves VF progression detection makes it a promising data integration tool in glaucoma management.
For patients with central vision loss and controls with normal vision, we examined the horizontal vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) in complete darkness and in the light when enhanced by vision (VVOR). We expected that the visual-vestibular interaction during VVOR would produce an asymmetry in the gain due to the location of the preferred retinal locus (PRL) of the patients. In the dark, we hypothesized that the VOR would not be affected by the loss of central vision. Nine patients (ages 67 to 92 years) and 17 controls (ages 16 to 81 years) were tested in 10-s active VVOR and VOR procedures at a constant frequency of 0.5 Hz while their eyes and head movements were recorded with a video-based binocular eye tracker. We computed the gain by analyzing the eye and head peak velocities produced during the intervals between saccades. In the light and in darkness, a significant proportion of patients showed larger leftward than rightward peak velocities, consistent with a PRL to the left of the scotoma. No asymmetries were found for the controls. These data support the notion that, after central vision loss, the preferred retinal locus (PRL) in eccentric vision becomes the centre of visual direction, even in the dark.
1 May 2023 in Journal of Cataract & Refractive Surgery
Purpose: To determine the amount of moxifloxacin remaining in the anterior chamber (AC), immediately after its injection using 3 current injection methods, assuming mixing and fluid exchange with the AC contents during injection of the drug, and to determine the most desirable injection method. Setting: Department of Ophthalmology and Vision Sciences and Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. Design: Mathematical modeling. Methods: Mathematical modeling using first-order mixing methods were used to assess mixing. Results: The Kaiser method of injecting 0.5 mL × 100 μg/0.1 mL does not achieve the desired 500 μg level of moxifloxacin in the AC. The “straight from the bottle” method of injecting 0.1 mL × 500 μg/0.1 mL is fraught with potential error, yielding a relatively unreliable final amount in the AC. Injecting 0.5 to 0.6 mL × 150 μg/0.1 mL yields a result closest to the desired goal. Conclusions: Based on the calculation, the most accurate of current methods to deliver 500 μg moxifloxacin intracamerally is the method of 150 μg/0.1 mL × 0.5 to 0.6 mL.