What’s up this ARVO?

To find out, we asked Associate Professor Eric Papas.
 
So Dr. Papas, can you tell us what this ‘ARVO’ is all about?

The ARVO annual meeting, which is always held at Fort Lauderdale in Florida, is probably the biggest science meeting for people involved in eye and vision research

What kind of people go to ARVO?

There’s about 5 000 researchers who attend - everybody from ophthalmologists, optometrists, vision scientists, biologists, psychophysicists, microbiologists and optical scientists.

What are some interesting presentations the Institute’s researchers are making this year?

One is a poster presentation by Dr. Vicki Evans, which is about people that drop out of contact lens wear. Vicki’s looked at our clinical data and she’s confirmed that discomfort and dryness are the major reasons for this. Interestingly though she has also found that younger people, particularly those under twenty, are more likely to drop out than older people.

Her presentation will be among those selected for a new ARVO feature this year, which is kind of a quick guide to the meeting. It’s almost like if you land from Mars and you don’t know what’s going on, here’s a list of the 50 things you might like to go and see.

Are there any others of particular interest?

Hua Zhu’s poster is quite topical because of recent concerns about the possibility of infection with contact lenses for a small number of wearers. Hua’s poster looks at the effectiveness of rubbing and rinsing contact lenses after wear. Her study counted how many bugs are left behind if you miss out steps of the contact lens care system. What she found was that if you just rinse the lens, you’ll get rid of some of them, but by no means as many as if you rub the lens between your fingers and then rinse.

Anything else a bit different?

Something a bit different is Arthur Ho’s presentation, which looks at replacing the lens inside the eye. As everyone gets older the elasticity of this lens changes, meaning it becomes more difficult to focus on near objects. Surgically, there is a lot of interest in trying to replace the natural lens of the eye with an artificial one to fix the problem.

Arthur’s work considers whether or not it matters exactly where you position the artificial lenses in the tiny space where they can be located inside the eye. You’d imagine that it would matter to some extent, because of the optics of the situation, but Arthur’s poster suggests it doesn’t matter all that much. So, providing you get it in there, it’s other things that influence how well you are going to be able change your focus. His poster basically gives some comfort for surgeons, because it tells them they can worry about other things, like the optical design of the device, rather than being very precise about where they position it.

Lastly, what does ‘ARVO’ stand for?

ARVO stands for the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology.

Associate Professor Eric Papas is Director of Post Graduate Studies and Executive Director of Research and Development at the Institute for Eye Research and Vision CRC.

To find more about ARVO, click here.